We are a social welfare Justice organisation that helps traditional rural communities in solving their social welfare challenges that cause inequality trap. We are their voice in social welfare offices to unlock those bottle necks .
What is your biggest success?
Our greatest achievement was to register more than 500 social welfare challenges in our first year of operation (2022) and successfully completed 430 cases which gave us 86% success . The remaining 15% it's cases that we are still working on due to complexity of cases and the social welfare offices turn-around times.
These cases ranged from children who did not have birth certificates and therefore could not access child care grant, mentally challenged people who did not have identity documents and therefore could not access disability grants and elderly people who did not have identity documents and could not access old age grants
These cases also included "abandoned children" whose mothers had disappeared and whereabouts are unknown and therefore their registration of Births were not done creating a bottleneck for them to access schools and child care grants. These children are often left in the care of their grandmothers
Lastly young adults from age 16 years to 59 years who did not have birth certificates in order for them to have identity documents to access higher institutions of education or seek employment
What has been your biggest hurdle?
Our biggest hurdle has been:
1. Relationship building with social welfare offices ( Department of Home Affairs , Dept of Social Development and South African Social Security Agency - SASSA) as we experienced attitudes from staff as they failed to understand our mission and vision - "to bSe the voice of rural communities"
2. Negligence from parents especially mothers - which is the result of some of the social welfare challenges and injustices
3. Lack of awareness on social welfare regulations by communities and the language barrier as all of the regulations are written in English
4. Non responsiveness of beneficiaries to provide required supporting documents in order to process the applications of a particular social welfare challenge
