State told to raise subsidies

A Free State social welfare organisation - which struggles to feed children in its care on R12 a day - has won a landmark court bid ordering the government to cough up.

The ruling paves the way for other cash-strapped charities to gain relief.

NG Social Services - a nonprofit organisation which supports abused women, children, the disabled and the elderly - took the Free State Department of Social Development to the High Court in Bloemfontein in June for paying inadequate subsidies.

The new Children's Act sets R6000 as the monthly amount needed to care for a child in a home. State-run childrens' homes receive close to 100% funding, but nonprofit organisations have had to make do with less than half that as a subsidy.

Judge Ian van der Merwe last week gave the department four months to implement a revised policy regarding its funding to nonprofit organisations after finding it ''inconsistent" with the department's constitutional and statutory obligations. He said the department had an obligation to provide care for vulnerable people.

NG Social Services head Willem Botha said the judgment could be used to secure similar orders in other provinces: ''Another NPO (non-profit organisation) must have the guts to take similar steps to go to court and ask for a similar judgment."

Botha, who also chairs the National Association of Welfare Organisations and Nongovernmental Organisations, said he had gone to court after the situation became ''unbearable".

Bertus Venter, head of legal services in the office of the Free State premier, said the judgment had also confirmed the principle that NPOs should contribute where possible from their own resources and sources of income.