Pretoria - There is still some work to do to improve service delivery for South African households.
The sentiment was expressed by statistician-general Risenga Maluleka in Pretoria who said that housing projects have not reduced the large number of people still residing in informal settlements.
Maluleka engaged journalists and stakeholders about the state of South African households following a 2018 survey that discovered that since household were basic units for service delivery, rapid household growth will contain the delivery of basic services.
The survey found that while the population of the country increased by at least 1.3% per annum from 2002 and 2018, the number of households actually increased by a concerning 2.4%.
This growth amounted to 48.9% over the same period.
Maluleka said: “Although the percentage of households that have received some kind of government subsidy to access housing has increased by 5.6% in 2002 to 13.6% by 2018, 13.1% of the households were still living in informal dwellings.”
He said StatsSA also discovered that social grants remains a vital safety net, particularly in the poorest provinces.
The percentage of households and persons who benefited from a social grant have increased decidedly since 2002.
“While 31% of persons benefited from a social grant in 2018, 44.3% of the households received one or more grants.
Grants were the second most important source of income (45.2%) for households after salaries (64.8%), and the main source of income for almost one-fifth (19.9%) of households nationally.”
Maluleke said although two thirds of pupils attended no-fee schools a “lack of money,” still contributed to pupils dropping out of schools.
This comes after the percentage of pupils who attended no-fee schools increased from 21.4% in 2007 to 67.2% by 2018.