Berenice Paulsen (left foreground) at the Bellville Sassa office in November 2025. We
reported then that she had been trying for five months to help her sister Desiree Fredericks (right foreground), to get an Older Persons Grant. Archive photo: Marecia Damons
Shorter queues, self-service kiosks and digital identity checks are among the changes the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) plans to rollout to offices across the country.
On Thursday, Sassa officials visited the Bellville office in Cape Town, one of the agency’s busiest, to assess how new electronic systems are working. The office has been piloting several digital interfaces for six months. The agency plans to introduce these to other provinces.
Brenton Van Vrede, Sassa’s executive manager for grant operations, said fingerprint biometrics were introduced in September 2025, followed by facial biometrics. Facial biometrics were initially only used for Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant beneficiaries. The system has been extended to other grants since March, with a national rollout underway, Van Vrede said.
One of the bigger changes is e-Life certification, which confirms that grant recipients are still alive, a long-standing problem for Sassa. The system uses facial biometrics linked to the Department of Home Affairs.
“In a number of parliamentary hearings, one of the big issues raised was that Sassa paid grants to people who already died,” he said. “If a person reports a death to Home Affairs, it automatically comes to us. But there are instances where people report deaths to Home Affairs late or not at all.”
On improving queue management, Oscar Muremi, senior manager for business improvements, said Sassa officials collect data on what beneficiaries are queuing for to better manage demand. Counters are then allocated based on how many beneficiaries are visiting for each service. He said counters are adjusted throughout the day depending on demand.
“As the day progresses, we’ll see, for example, that customer care is moving fast, and we’ll use that counter for applications, to increase the number of people we service throughout the day. The whole idea is to shorten the customers’ waiting time.”
Self-service kiosks are another new feature. Van Vrede said each office has at least one. “The kiosk is where the beneficiaries can assist themselves. But if they need assistance, they will be assisted. Although it is a self-service desk, we will always have someone available to help you,” he said.
At the Bellville office, manager Celiwe Mngqongiwe said the changes are already helping.
“The new systems in place have assisted us in managing the queues because now we are able to manage many beneficiaries at the same time. We also assist them on their smartphones and they can connect to the client WiFi,” she said.
Sassa hopes more people will eventually be able to apply for grants without visiting an office.
“We are currently still relying on supporting documents, so if they can scan their documents and can upload them on our portal and submit them, they can do the entire process without visiting a Sassa office,” Muremi said.
Wendy Kaizer-Philander, chairperson of the provincial standing committee on social development, said she had seen a clear improvement.
“I was pleasantly surprised coming back this morning to see that the queues have substantially decreased,” she said.
She cautioned, however, that more work is needed to ensure the system runs smoothly. Concerns include staffing shortages and whether there are enough officials to assist people using self-service kiosks.
“There also needs to be an honest conversation if there are glitches and what the turnaround time is for those issues to be sorted out” she said.
Fewer beneficiaries receiving grants
Sassa CEO Themba Matlou told Parliament’s social development portfolio committee last week that the number of grant recipients has declined. At the start of the 2025/26 financial year, 19.3-million people were receiving grants (excluding SRD). By March 2026, this had dropped to 18.8-million, a decrease of about 416,778.
The largest declines were in the Eastern Cape (76,000), KwaZulu-Natal (74,000) and Limpopo (66,000), with the biggest drops in child support and foster care grants. Recipients of some grants, including old-age and disability grants, increased.
Matlou said the decline is partly due to stricter reviews. He said biometric enrolment has also helped reduce fraud, with one million new applications processed between September 2025 and March 2026.
SASSA said improving reviews has saved about R44-million per month.
This article was originally published on GroundUp.
© 2026 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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