Increase in social relief grant

The income threshold for the Social Relief of Distress Grant is being increased.

It will be moved from the current R350 to R624.

This is in line with the poverty line income test, and will give more people access to the grant.

“You see, one of the things which we have done because we realized when we got the budget at the beginning of the year, the financial year that we were not going to cover necessarily the same number of people that we had been covering in the second iteration of the grant,” the Social Development Department’s Brenda Sibeko said.

“By the end of March of this year we were covering 10.9-million people and we realized that now that the allocation we have is for 10.5-million, we are forced in order to stay within the budget to change some of the regulations that we had before.”

“So we found that now the numbers we are covering are much lower. So one of the things that we are doing is to actually increase the income threshold that we are doing so that we can give more people access to the money.”

“In the current year, we find that we have paid around 5.2-million people who qualified in the current iteration, the new iteration we’ve got because we had reduced the means test so drastically.

“We had put the means test at R350. So what we want to do in order to increase the number of people to at least reach the 10-million people that are clearly struggling is to increase that level of income test that we are doing so that everyone who is at least below the R624, which is the food poverty line income test, can at least be able to get the R350 so that we can also make that contribution to reducing hunger.”

Source: eNCA

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