South Africa’s R350 coronavirus grants will be made available to more people

Social Development minister Lindiwe Zulu says that the special Covid-19 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant will be made available to more people.

In a presentation on Thursday (30 July), Zulu said that qualifying applicants will receive R350 per month until the end of October.

The grant is open to applicants who are not beneficiaries of any other form of social security grant or UIF payment and are not currently receiving income.

“Let me hasten to add that the information of all the applicants who were previously disqualified by the various validations databases we work with – for instance, the UIF, SARS, NSFAS, etc – is continuously being re-run in these databases,” Zulu said.

“Therefore, all the applicants that were previously disqualified due to database errors are being reconsidered.”

As these issues are addressed, Zulu said that the number of applicants who are eligible for the special Covid-19 SRD grant is increasing.

“These are being notified of their payment of the special Covid-19 SRD grant,” she said.

“In this regard, payments for the months of June and July – totalling R700 – have commenced, and approximately one million applicants in this category of applicants are receiving their payments.”

Basic Income Grant

Zulu also welcomed recent discourse around the possible introduction of a basic income grant, which she said would help extend financial support to a large group of South Africans.

“As much as we are meticulously noting what works with the Covid-19 SRD grant, we are equally welcoming and encouraging deeper public discourse that is centred at innovating sustainable social protection coverage solutions that are targeted at addressing poverty and inequality by developing our society: the world’s most unequal society,” she said.

“Therefore, every South African must contribute towards meaningfully defining the paths that will engineer our society into the new normal wherein, as we envisaged in the National Development Plan (NDP), the social protection coverage is extended to the missing middle parts our population.

“Therefore, we call upon each South African to bring their innovative, ingenious, creative solutions to the possibilities, design and scale of the BIG solution,” Zulu said.

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