Home Affairs standing in the way of kids getting grants
Social grants are out of the reach of many of the poorest South Africans because they cannot afford to get the necessary identity documents from the Department of Home Affairs.
Some of the biggest barriers are money for transport to the Home Affairs offices or to pay for documents they needed to get ID books, such as baptismal and doctors’ certificates, photographs and photocopies.
This is according to a recent ‘rapid appraisal’ of how Home Affairs’ policies and practices affect children, which was commissioned by the Alliance for Children’s Entitlement to Social Security (ACESS) and released in Cape Town yesterday (10 April).
Over a quarter of children did not live with their mothers, according to ACESS, and this made getting birth certificates for them very complicated.
It was thus essential that every effort was made to ensure that children were registered at birth.
The ACCESS appraisal focused on services in rural Nongoma in KwaZulu-Natal and urban Khayelitsha in Cape Town, as well as the experiences of 28 organisations countrywide that help people to access grants.
It is punctuated by numerous examples of people battling to get documents so that they can apply for grants ‘ some facing insurmountable financial barriers.
Over the past 10 years, Thandiwe* ‘ a mother of eight children ‘ has applied for an ID four times. Each time, her application was refused as she was told to bring other documents. When she finally had all the necessary documents, including her parents’ ID books, she was chased away from the Nongoma office by an official who claimed that her parents were ‘too old to be her parents’.
None of her children have birth certificates, but she cannot yet apply for them until she has her ID Book. Only then will she be able to apply for grants for her children.
Elderly Busisiwe*, whose birth was never registered, has tried at least four times to get an ID so that she can apply for a pension. She has twice paid a R50 ‘fast-tracking fee’ to officials ‘ only to find there was no record of her application.
She is now saving for her next attempt, but for the unemployed woman the barriers are almost insurmountable. She needs R48 taxi fare to Nongoma for herself and a witness who can testify to who she is, R20 for a baptismal certificate, R15 for revenue stamps, R50 ‘fast-tracking fee’, R150 for a doctors’ letter corroborating her age and gender, R20 for photographs and 50c per page for photocopies of all the documents.
There were numerous reports of corrupt officials demanding bribes for free services ‘ such as the ‘fast-tracking fee’.
The report also found that while there have been great improvements in birth registrations over the past decade, mainly through organising for births to be registered at hospitals, one-fifth of children under 14 who died in 2004 had not been registered.
‘Obtaining enabling documents for unregistered orphans presents near-insurmountable barriers for caregivers. Challenges are compounded by caregivers’ illiteracy, poverty and HIV/AIDS-related stigma,’ said ACESS.
The alliance appealed to Home Affairs to prioritise the poorest communities in its new ‘turnaround strategy’ so that those most in need could get urgent access to social benefits.
New Home Affairs Director General Mavuso Msimang recently reported that an ID passes through the hands of approximately 80 people before being processed, providing plenty of opportunities for bribes to be extorted.
Government’s R200 monthly child support grant is for children under the age of 14 who live in rural households with an income of under R1 100 per month or urban households that live on less than R800 a month.
Two-thirds of South African children live in households that survive on less than R1 200 a month. Yet of those eligible, the kids from the very poorest households were least likely to be getting grants, according to an analysis of the General Household Survey.
Only 40% of children from the poorest households were getting grants, while almost 60% of those who were relatively better off were getting grants.
In a very poor rural region of the Eastern Cape, only 55 out of the 300 children eligible for child support grants were getting them, according to the ACCESS report.
‘Most of the people in our community can’t afford the R100 taxi fare to get to Home Affairs in Mthatha,’ reports an NGO worker trying to help out.
The lack of official documents also prevented poor households from automatically qualifying for fee exemptions at clinics and hospitals, as well as getting death benefits, housing subsidies and employment.
Access to Home Affairs offices was a big problem as the department only has about half the recommended number of offices, and is battling with a lack of staff.
A 2005 survey by the HSRC found ‘pockets of poor access to Home Affairs services’ in rural Eastern Cape (31% had no birth certificates), rural Free State and urban informal areas of Gauteng.
The report made a number of recommendations to improve services. These include:
- the decentralisation of functions so that not everything had to go via Pretoria;
- Establishing a ‘troubleshooter’ ‘ either a help desk or a senior official ‘ in every office dedicated to dealing with complicated cases, so that people did not have to return repeatedly to the offices.
- Displaying information on what documents were needed for each application, the costs involved and who to contact if officials asked for bribes.
- Issuing receipts for every application
- Compensating people if the department had lost their applications.
- Expanding birth registration to immunisation clinics and children’s wards in hospitals.
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