The Grant in Aid is a social grant available in South Africa and is used to assist the care needs of older persons who are “in need of regular assistance.” It subsidises care needs for those who are not in residential care facilities, forming a key part of the strategy of supporting ageing in place. The older person needs to be in receipt of an Older Person’s Grant to be eligible for the grant and they must be living at home. The Grant in Aid is a key part of South Africa’s social assistance programme and caters for people living with a disability and who are ‘in need of regular assistance.’ In this report we look at how the Grant in Aid is received by older persons only [1]. This grant has been largely overlooked in national priorities, campaigns, academic reviews and the wider literature. Whilst it makes up a small percentage of the overall social grant programme and expenditure, it is expected to increase as the number of older persons living with a disability increase.
In this report we consider how the grant is conceptualised, what it is expected to do, who it is designed to support and some of the assumptions made in this process. We present a short background on the origins of the Grant in Aid and how it has changed over time. We review how receipt of the Grant in Aid has increased only marginally over the last 10 years. At the national level, only 7 percent of older persons in 2024 receive a Grant in Aid, although the percentage of receipt differs radically across provinces. Estimates of care need, whilst difficult to assess, are estimated to be approximately 40 percent of the older person population, specifically, the older person grant receiving population. In 2024, the number of Grant in Aid recipients had increased to 291 487 older persons. According to estimates of care need, there could be approximately 1.5 million recipients. Much of the increase in the recent receipt occurs in three provinces, namely in KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and the Northern Cape.
Minister of Social Development, Nokuzola Gladys Tolashe in 2024 stated that “one of my urgent administrative tasks is to create an enabling environment and stabilize the Department and its entities by ensuring that there is capacity to implement the strategy, that citizens are able to access services at their doorstep.” This report tries to assist the department with achieving the task by highlighting the administrative challenges older persons experience in navigating the Grant in Aid. We explore reasons for the low receipt but we also investigate the increase in receipt in specific provinces. What are the processes in different provinces and what initiatives or programmes are in place for making the grant more accessible for older persons.
The report presents the experiences of older persons and their caregivers. Over the last two years, we have been working closely with 100 older persons and their family carers. Our report shows how very few persons know about the grant and even fewer had applied for it or received it. Only 7 out of 100 older persons received the grant. Based on our work with 100 older persons in the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, we argue that at least 35 out of 100 older persons were eligible for the grant. We wanted to find out why there are not more recipients.
In this report we present an overview of how we assisted 15 older persons wit information and the application process. By supporting the application process, we saw ‘what it takes’ to apply for and receive the Grant in Aid, both in terms of access to knowledge, networks (capital), caregiver support, time, money and transport. It was through this process that we could identify the inconsistencies across local offices in the same provinces and differences across provinces. The local practices in some offices were useful to think of best practices in relation to the process.