SA sees marked increase in social grant payments - Stats SA
Statistics South Africa on Thursday revealed that the number of people who benefited from social grants increased from 12.8% to 39.4% between 2002 and 2023.
Stats SA released the 2023 General Household Survey in Pretoria on Thursday.
The increase was due to the large uptake of COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress grants.
The agency said households that contained at least one individual who received a grant increased from 30.8% to 50%.
During the State of the Nation Address, President Cyril Ramaphosa said the government was working towards making the R350 Social Relief of Distress grant a basic income grant for the unemployed.
The General Household Survey was introduced in 2002 to track development progress across a wide variety of fields and identify persistent service delivery gaps in themes ranging from social welfare, health, and education to housing, basic services, and access to food.
The survey also indicates that approximately 9.8 million individuals had medical aid coverage in 2023.
"Coverage varied from 25.7% in WC to 9.5% in Limpopo, although 71.7% of white South Africans were members of a medical aid scheme, whites only comprised 31,7% of all medical aid members," said Statistician-General Risenga Maluleke
Some of the key findings include improvement in piped water, access to sanitation and electricity.
"Almost nine in ten (87%) of households had access to piped water in the dwelling, in the yard or at a communal tap, while 83.3% had access to improved sanitation (flush toilets and VIP pit toilets), up from 61.7% in 2002,” Maluleke said.
"Almost one quarter (23.1%) of households considered their access to food as inadequate or severely inadequate, five percentage points higher than in 2019 before the outbreak of COVID-19. The need was most pervasive in the Northern Cape (37.7%) and least common in Limpopo (6.9%),” he added.
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