The South African government on Tuesday made a final proposal to raise the means test for the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant to R624 a month.
Lindiwe Zulu, South Africa’s Social Development Minister made the final proposal on behalf of the government.
This means that anyone with a monthly income of more than R624 a month will not qualify for the grant. R624 is the food poverty line.
The maximum income level to qualify was set at R350 from 1 April, which caused large numbers of applicants to be disqualified. The new regulations were gazetted on Tuesday.
Since May 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant has been in effect.
Initially, all applicants with an income below R624 qualified with a total of 10.5 million people receiving the grant regularly. However, since the means test was dropped on 1 April less than 50% of applicants were successful, leading to 5.2 million people qualifying.
The minister had announced a month ago that she intended to ease the criteria, following pressure from pro-poor civil society and advocacy groups.
Also, the requirement of bank pre-qualification, verifying income flows into bank accounts, was also dropped by the agency that administers the grant, the SA Social Security Agency of SA (Sassa).
Sassa has not released an updated report on the number of successful applicants.
