More than 17 million people applied for the R370 grant in September
Most applicants have never had a job
More than 17 million people applied for the R370-a-month Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant in September 2024, according to the latest figures supplied by the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA).
This is an increase of more than three million people since September 2021, when 13.8 million people applied.
About a quarter (4.1 million) of the SRD grant applicants in September applied for the grant for the first time.
KwaZulu-Natal had the highest number of applicants with 4.4 million applications. This was followed by Gauteng with 3.2 million and Limpopo with 2.3 million applications.
Approximately 9.3 million of the applicants were women and 7.9 million were men.
About 1.2 million applicants have no formal schooling, but most (93%) have some education. The largest group (7.5 million) have finished matric, and more than 945,000 applicants have a tertiary qualification.
More than half of all applicants (9.2 million) have never been employed. A total of 4.8 million people have been working for one year or less, and 384,000 currently have jobs. To qualify for the SRD grant, applicants must have no other source of income.
SASSA said that 7.5 million SRD grant beneficiaries had been paid in August.
Next: Germiston informal settlement neglected since dawn of democracy
Previous: Housing activists welcome City’s intention to develop Mowbray golf course
© 2024 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.