Jobless South Africans Still Waiting as Emergency Aid Stretches Into Its Seventh Year

Six years ago, a R350 monthly payment landed in the bank accounts of unemployed South Africans as a short-term emergency measure. The government introduced the Social Relief of Distress grant in May 2020 with a clear expiration date: six months. Covid-19 lockdowns had collapsed the economy. The grant was meant to help people survive.

Lockdown is now history. The grant remains.

The SRD has evolved into something the government keeps extending rather than ending. It now pays R370 a month to about eight million working-age South Africans. For the year ahead, the government has allocated another R36.4 billion to keep payments flowing, with the latest extension running until 31 March 2027.

The reason is not complicated. South Africa still faces mass unemployment, with the official rate sitting at 33.6% in the second quarter of 2026. Millions of adults have little or no other income. Removing the grant would cut off a lifeline overnight. But making it permanent means finding billions of rand every year, indefinitely, and that is a problem nobody in government has fully resolved.

This tension sits at the heart of a legal battle now heading to South Africa’s highest court. On 25 August, the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein will hear the government’s appeal against a High Court judgment that found several parts of the SRD system unconstitutional or unlawful.

The case was brought by the Institute for Economic Justice and #PayTheGrants, represented by the Socio-Economic Rights Institute. In January 2025, the North Gauteng High Court declared the regulations governing the R370 amount, the income threshold, and the online-only application system unconstitutional. The court also ordered government to take steps towards progressively increasing both the grant value and the eligibility threshold. The government wants that judgment overturned.

What the case exposes is a problem government has been avoiding for years: who should receive income support, how much they should receive, and how much the state can actually afford.

Treasury faces a straightforward arithmetic problem. Nobody argues that R370 is enough to live on. The difficulty emerges when you multiply even small increases by millions of beneficiaries across twelve months. The current programme already requires R36.4 billion annually. During litigation, Treasury warned that combinations of higher grants and wider eligibility could dramatically increase costs for a government already facing fiscal constraints.

A permanent grant is not a once-off emergency expense. It becomes an obligation the government must fund again next year, and the year after that. That money has to come from somewhere: additional revenue, borrowing, cuts to other spending, or stronger economic growth that brings more tax into the system.

Civil society organisations argue that fiscal pressure does not justify making access unnecessarily difficult. The Institute for Economic Justice studied 900 people living in poverty and found that only 10.3% had actually received payment in the month they applied, indicating an average monthly exclusion rate of 89.7% among eligible respondents. The researchers deliberately selected poor people who had experienced exclusion, so the sample cannot be applied to the entire country. But the study reveals how the system can fail.

Applications are digital. Eligibility checks rely heavily on automated data. Bank deposits can become particularly messy when an automated system cannot distinguish between R500 from a relative for groceries and R500 in wages. To a human being, the difference is obvious. To an automated system looking at money entering an account, it becomes much less clear.

A common argument holds that paying unemployed people without requiring work will discourage job-seeking. The evidence on the SRD does not support this simple conclusion. Research has shown that receiving the grant was associated with a 2.9 to 3.5 percentage-point increase in the probability of employment in one study. The government has also argued repeatedly that income support helps recipients search for work and participate in economic activity.

This makes sense when you consider something easily forgotten in debates about dependency: looking for work costs money. Taxi fares cost money. Data costs money. Printing documents costs money. Getting across town for an interview costs money. R370 is nowhere near enough to replace a salary. But if you have zero rand, R370 can be the difference between applying for a job and not being able to get there.

The Department of Social Development has proposed moving from the temporary SRD towards a permanent form of basic income support for poor working-age adults. Its strategic plans describe the goal as transitioning from the temporary Covid-19 grant to permanent support for poor and unemployed people aged 18 to 59.

South Africa’s Constitution adds another layer. Section 27 states that everyone has the right of access to social security, including appropriate social assistance for those who cannot support themselves and their dependents. South Africa has a constitutional duty to expand access to social assistance. It does not have unlimited money. Both sides of this debate can point to a genuine problem: millions of people need support, and the government has to fund that support sustainably.

For beneficiaries, nothing changes immediately. The SRD remains R370 a month and is funded until 31 March 2027. The Supreme Court of Appeal hearing could have significant consequences for how the grant’s value, eligibility rules, and application system are handled going forward.

South Africa created the SRD because millions of adults suddenly had no income during a historic emergency. Then the emergency ended, but the poverty that made the grant necessary did not. Six years later, government is still extending the solution one year at a time. At some point, the word “temporary” stops describing a policy and starts describing a government’s inability to make a permanent decision. The question the Bloemfontein court cannot answer, but someone eventually must, is what comes after the next extension.