The South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) recently revealed that it received a total of 13 474 520 applications by the end of January 2023.
The figures were revealed by the Minister of Social Development, Lindiwe Zulu, this week during a meeting of the parliamentary portfolio committee. According to Zulu, every month, between 7.4 million and 7.8 million applications are approved.
“As far as payments are concerned, about 95% of approved applicants were paid for the early months. This coverage dropped to about 90% in August 2022. We experienced a further drop to 85% in more recent months,” she said.
The majority of applicants for the SRD grant, according to the department, were young individuals between the ages of 18 and 35.
According to the report, 921,154 applicants had no formal education, 1,063,718 had only completed elementary school, 5,296,937 had completed grade 10, and 5,476,511 had completed grade 12. Out of the 13 million applications received, a total of 716,200 tertiary graduates submitted grant applications.
The figure has also become a cause for concern since unemployment and not having any alternative source of income form part of the grant’s eligibility requirements.
This, according to experts, reflects the country’s worsening youth unemployment that has been exacerbated by the Covid–19 pandemic.
“This means that there is a bottleneck somewhere in the market where people are not getting employed and they need some sort of relief to survive the day-to-day burdens of life”
In addition to this, the overall total of applicants from all nine provinces shows that 56% of them are female applicants, while male applicants make up 44% of the total.
Meanwhile, during his annual Budget Speech, Finance Minister, Enoch Godongwana revealed that R36 billion will be allocated to the extension of the SRD grant throughout 2023/24 financial year.
The Minister also pointed out that the extensions are likely to further impact the further allocation of state funds going forward.
