Question NW2448 to the Minister of Social Development
17 July 2023 - NW2448
van der Merwe, Ms LL to ask the Minister of Social Development
Considering that, according to the Estimates of National Expenditure 2023 shared by the National Treasury, her department intends to strengthen community engagements in 34 districts over the medium term by implementing the Community Mobilisation and Empowerment Framework, which promotes the use of household and community profiling to inform service and support provision and furthermore aims to link 2% of grant recipients with sustainable livelihood opportunities, (a) how did her department reach the 2% target and (b) what are the detailed reasons that the specified figure is so low, considering that there are almost 27 million grant recipients?
Reply:
a) The department of social development through SASSA provide grants to most vulnerable individuals in our country. There are different types of grants that are provided to vulnerable and poor individuals. In 2018/19 financial year the department planned to link abled bodied and young beneficiaries of child support grants (mothers of the children receiving grants) at the time of planning there were over 11million child support grant recipients. Currently there over 13.1million child support grants. The plan to link two percentage (2%) was preceded by the development of a framework to guide provinces. The linking programme started in the 2021/2022 financial year with only 20 000 grant beneficiaries linked to sustainable livelihoods.
b) The linking of 2% grant beneficiaries was meant to link only child support grants of which there just over 11million at the time of planning. The linking programme entails identifying young mothers and providing them with skills for employability, establishing projects and creating small businesses for them to depend on. Department intends to implement the Project on Linking in a gradual form taking into cognizance the amount of work that precedes the linking exercise such as identification of grant recipients, profiling of grant recipients, dialoguing to determine interests and skills possessed by mothers grant recipients, identification of opportunities where they can be linked, etc. The department set a 2% target based on the available resources the department has at their disposal. The Department believes that 2% is an affordable and achievable target. The target will be gradually increased based on the achievement of current target.