Inadequate disability grants for SA children thrust families into poverty

Government’s grant of R2,090 for the country’s disabled children is not enough to meet their needs or provide social protection to their families.

That’s the conclusion reached in a study by Stellenbosch University PhD graduate Dr Zara Trafford from the Institute for Life Course Health Research.

Families without an income, that care for a disabled child, can barely survive on the state grant due to the high cost of caring for them. As a result they receive poor care.

Even families with additional income “are at risk of extreme poverty”.

Children in need of full-time care, who are not permanently looked after in a state institution in South Africa, are eligible for the R2,090 per month care dependency grant (CDG).

“None of the South African government’s grant programmes are intended to serve as standalone social protection, but there is a particularly dire lack of responsibility for disability and support for disabled children from government bodies beyond the department of social development,” said Trafford.

Doctors saw the CDG as a fund that would allow families to cater to the developmental needs of their disabled child but were also aware that state budgets were strained and worried that there might be problems with fairness across the country.

—  PhD graduate Dr Zara Trafford

Trafford said this form of social grant was not prioritised enough and remained under-researched compared with the regular child support grant and disability grant for adults.

Trafford interviewed parents who receive the grant, South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) officials, doctors who conduct CDG assessments and social workers.

“Caregivers felt that because they often had to stay away from work to provide proper care to their child, the CDG should provide for all of their disabled child’s needs, at the very least,” she said.

“Doctors saw the CDG as a fund that would allow families to cater to the developmental needs of their disabled child but were also aware that state budgets were strained and worried that there might be problems with fairness across the country.”

Though the grant provided needed support to families, high levels of unemployment and a lack of complementary services from other government departments created barriers for those caring for disabled children.

In many homes the grant was absorbed into an income pool and used to care for everybody in a household, and pay for other services that should be free or heavily subsidised by government, such as transport, special-needs education and disability-inclusive health care.

Trafford said the more government departments were involved in attending to the needs of the disabled, the lower the burden on families.

“Disability is supposed to be an intersectoral responsibility, meaning every single government department should be considering and actively making plans to increase the inclusion of people with disabilities in all of their programming,” said Trafford.

“On a daily basis, parents and other primary caregivers report that transport is an especially expensive and difficult part of their lives. Most are forced to use private transport and e-hailing services, which would generally be far outside their budget, to get their children to educational or health services.”

Stakeholders also differed in their understanding of the intended purpose of the disability grant.

Sassa officials saw the grant as an acknowledgment of the full-time care often required for children with disabilities, but emphasised that the CDG was not intended as total income replacement. Social workers and assessing doctors pointed out that families struggled to access the CDG early enough for optimal health and wellbeing of beneficiaries.

This was because government entities were concerned about “inclusion errors” such as people who are ineligible for specific grants gaining access to those grants fraudulently.

“While the caregivers who participated in my study had eventually gained access to the CDG, this had often been delayed for many years. In most of these cases, parents had only gained access after repeated rejections from frontline Sassa officials, though these officials are not technically supposed to make these decisions.”

Parents were also worried about their children’s transition to adulthood, as the adult disability grant is not automatically given to those who previously received a CDG.

Trafford called for intersectoral collaboration and the prioritisation of disabled children’s rights “to ensure children with disabilities have a better quality of life”.