Covid social relief of distress (SRD) grants will be paid until March 2024, in line with President Cyril Ramaphosa’s announcement in his state of the nation address.
The National Treasury has allocated R36bn to fund the extension of the R350-a-month SRD grant for the next year.
In all, social development — which includes social grants and welfare services — has been allocated R1.1-trillion over the medium term.
Social grants remain the government’s largest spending area, and the allocation — up by R30bn — has increased in line with inflation.
According to the Budget Review, the SRD grant, which reaches 7.4-million people, will be extended “to mitigate the impact of the slow economic recovery and increased poverty due to the Covid pandemic”.
[The grant] is here and it’s not going to go away. We should move into proper design for a permanent arrangement
— Michael Sachs
Michael Sachs, adjunct professor at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at Wits University and former head of the Treasury budget office, says the SRD extension was expected.
“[The grant] is here and it’s not going to go away. We should move into proper design for a permanent arrangement. It’s good to protect people against poverty and hunger. With the cost of living shocks, we couldn’t allow inflation to erode these provisions.”
Trade union federation Cosatu, however, says it is unacceptable that the SRD grant hasn’t been adjusted for inflation from the time it was introduced in 2020.
The Budget Review says the government will continue its efforts to ensure the social and economic inclusion of women, youth and people living with disabilities, and the department responsible received an allocation of R2.7bn over the next three years.
The child support grant will increase from R480 to R505 on October 1* and the foster care grant will increase from R1,070 to R1,125.
For decades, special interest groups have lobbied for recognition of the central role women play, and the budget acknowledged this with increased provisions for social protections.
Three-quarters of women-headed households live below the poverty line, says Tshidi Lencoasa, a budget researcher at lobby group Section27. And the hard lockdowns of 2020 — and violence endured mostly by women — brought to the fore their “unpaid roles” as caregivers, educators and in early childhood development.
“Given the crucial role played by women-headed households and high youth unemployment, this year we have the first glimmer of gender-responsive budgeting,” says Lencoasa.
In particular, she welcomes the extension of the SRD grant but says questions remain about how it will be funded in the long term.
Like Cosatu, she believes the R350 a month has been eaten away by inflation since the grant was introduced at the height of the pandemic.
“Women have to find additional sources of income as inflation and steadily rising cost of living increases erode their grants,” she says.
* The October 1 grant increase was announced in minister Enoch Godongwana's budget speech. However, according to the Children's Institute at the University of Cape Town, the department of social development has subsequently confirmed that the implementation date for the increases is in fact April 1, with further increases in October
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