The promise to double the Older Persons Grant to R4,500 a month is landing well with pensioners who have marched in recent weeks demanding an increase. The harder question, though, is not the size of the monthly payment. It is whether the services and infrastructure older South Africans depend on are being built, funded and delivered at all, and that record is far weaker than the grant numbers suggest.
On paper, the income programme is impressive. The Older Persons Grant now reaches 4.16 million people, up from around 2.2 million in 2006/07. Nominal expenditure has grown almost fivefold, from R21.9 billion to R106.8 billion, and the grant accounts for roughly 98.5% of state funding directed towards elder care. Adjusted for inflation, the picture changes. The real annual value per person has stayed remarkably stable, approximately R25,640 in 2024/25 against around R25,400 in 2006/07 in equivalent terms. The system has expanded in scale but not in depth. More people receive the grant, yet each recipient has little more purchasing power than two decades ago.
That gap between reach and substance shows in how the grant is actually used. Research on family caregiving, drawing on 100 detailed monthly budgets from pensioner households, shows that a grant intended to support one older person frequently pays for food, electricity and other basic costs for several generations. Women receive the grant about three times more often than men, and older women are particularly likely to live in large, multigenerational households. When working-age adults cannot find employment, the pension becomes income for everyone. The alternative available to many households, the Social Relief of Distress grant, is just R375 a month.
Older people therefore do need more money. But more money in the OPG is not investment in elder care, and delivery is where the system is failing. Provincial spending on community-based care for older people has fallen by approximately 26% over the past two decades, even as grant expenditure expanded. That is a troubling trend in a country that increasingly promotes ageing in place, the idea that older people should remain in their homes and communities rather than being forced into institutions. Ageing in place requires somewhere to age well: home-based care, transport, respite services for family caregivers, day centres, rehabilitation, support for people living with disabilities, and people who can help with the everyday tasks that become difficult with age. An additional R1,000 or R2,000 in an older person’s pocket cannot create these services if they simply do not exist.
This is the fundamental problem with treating grants as a substitute for care. Some things can be bought individually; care infrastructure cannot. An older person cannot personally purchase an accessible public transport system, establish a community day centre, employ a network of home-based carers at a sustainable scale, or create a respite-care service for a daughter who has cared for them daily for five years. These require collective investment.
Meanwhile, the unevenness of delivery compounds the problem. Support for services varies sharply across the country, with rural and informal areas obtaining less. South Africa has densely populated, poorly serviced communities with substantial and growing older populations. Many informal settlements have inadequate sanitation, poor transport and limited access to health and social services, and access to residential, respite and day care is even more limited. Khayelitsha is a striking example: approximately 20,000 older person grant beneficiaries live there, yet only now is the first residential care facility being established to serve this population. Identifying the ageing hotspots and investing accordingly is a delivery task the state has yet to perform at scale.
There is also an existing mechanism that could channel additional resources to households facing the extra costs of disability and care, and it is badly underused. The Grant in Aid is designed for OPG beneficiaries who require regular assistance because of their care needs. Yet only around 6% of beneficiaries, approximately 252,000 people, receive it, while research estimates suggest the number who could require significant assistance is closer to 1.5 million. The Grant in Aid is too small to fund substantial care dependency and is not a solution to the country’s long-term care crisis, but expanding access to it would be a targeted and credible place for politicians to start if they want promises grounded in delivery rather than headline numbers.
None of this means politicians should stop talking about the OPG. Older people clearly need greater income security, and the current value of the grant does not adequately meet the cost of living, particularly when it supports entire households. But a bigger pension is not a long-term care policy. The debate needs to move beyond the size of the monthly payment and ask what kind of system is being built for an ageing population: whether older people can get care when they become frail, whether their families can receive support, whether someone who has had a stroke can access rehabilitation and home-based care, whether an older person living alone can get to a clinic, whether caregivers can take a break, and whether communities have places where older people can socialise and remain connected. These are the infrastructure of an ageing society.
So as politicians compete to promise bigger grants, commitments to improving income security deserve a welcome. But harder questions should follow. Where are the commitments to home-based care? Where are the investments in respite care, accessible transport and community services? What will be done to ensure the Grant in Aid reaches the millions who need additional support? South Africa is not simply facing a social grant challenge. It is facing an ageing and care challenge, and if the response is only to put more money into the OPG, the state may reach more people without actually providing the support they need. What is required is a system that delivers both income security and care.
Professor Elena Moore is a professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cape Town.