South African Social Security Agency SASSA: Defining the road ahead Fezile Makiwane

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South African Social Security Agency
Defining the Road Ahead Building Capabilities of
SASSA 13 July 2005
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Presentation Outline

• Background
• The delivery context
• Specific institutional challenges
• Capability constraints of current service
  delivery model
• The new Service Delivery Model
• Concluding remarks

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Background

• Social assistance is one of the main poverty
  alleviation programs of government targeting
  vulnerable groups and individuals.
• Through social assistance, government provides
  income support to over over 9.8 million
• 2,2 million old age pensioners and war veterans
• 1,3 million disabled adults
• 140 000 foster care children
• 90 000 care dependent children
• 6 million child support grants beneficiaries
• Budget projected to be in excess of R55 billion
  this year, rising to R60 billion during the MTEF
  period
• The coverage of the Social grants program has
  increased 3.5 times since 1994, significantly
  reducing the proportion of people that would be
  living in poverty.

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Delivery context

• The delivery context is characterized by a range
  of factors
• that affect any delivery institution in South
  Africa.
• Some of these factors include
• Geographical spread of the population
• Competition for skills
• The nature of the economy
• The apartheid legacy
• Poverty and exclusion
• Uneven development,
• Disparities in capacity and infrastructure, etc.

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Specific Institutional Challenges

• Despite huge improvements, the current social
  assistance delivery
• system is beset by a number of deficiencies,
  including
• Fragmented institutional arrangements
• A lack of uniformity across Provinces and
  inefficient processes
• Poor management
• Unequal distribution and development of human
  resources
• Questionable competencies and skills
• high transaction costs
• High levels of fraud
• The poor quality of service delivery, long
  distance for some, hours in the queues
• These problems inhibit access to social
  assistance, despite the fact that
• such access is constitutionally guaranteed for
  those who are unable to
• support themselves and their dependants.

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Assess of Value Chain and Capabilities
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Capability constraints of the current model

• To achieve major and quick impact, trade-offs
  need to be made in
• respect of prioritizing capabilities.
• A fragmented institutional structure.
• Disintegrated and inefficient business processes,
  duplication and non-value adding procedures
• Lack of dedicated, focused corporate support
  functions.
• Human resource competencies and skills not geared
  toward specialized nature of the service -
  variable staffing standards
• Inadequate financial acumen given transaction
  nature of business
• Insufficient, inequitable distribution of
  infrastructure facilities

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The new Service Delivery Model
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Institutional Arrangements How will this change?
Financial and Grant Administration reporting
lines maintained
New, independent, corporatised, specialist
agency focused and motivated towards service
delivery
Reporting lines nominal
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Benefits of this capability

• The new Institutional Structure will provide
• Clear lines of accountability,
• Specialist,
• focused on core business of grants or benefit
  administration,
• standardized and consistent approach,
• Transparent performance management.

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The business process changes
The Grant Administration process will be
reengineered

• Fewer steps
• Less people involved
• Technology enabled
• Faster
• Standardised
• Easily verified

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Human resource competencies

• Staffing structures better aligned to core
  business of services to beneficiaries
• Staffing numbers, in addition to be equitably
  spread, will have to
• match with business requirements such as
  frontline specialist,
• units for compliance,
• units for beneficiary maintenance and reviews
• Appropriate and well aligned staff with
  appropriate skills will ensure the grants or
  benefits builds an effective on-ramp and off-ramp
• Staff development must be in line with service
  delivery requirements and not generic
• There is a need to develop an effective
  performance monitoring system that is linked to
  norms and standards for delivery that inform the
  KPIs
• A high performance culture based on effective
  performance measurement systems - output and
  service level focused.
• A change in culture to a customer-centric focus.
• Invest in people and their development

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Building Financial Acumen

• The grants admin system distributes over R55
  billion. This is a transaction based institution
  that requires financial acumen.
• The Agency business case is built on the promise
  of reducing the current operational costs of
  6-7per annum
• Improved budgeting and planning will be achieved
  through beneficiary forecasting models
• Explicit requirement of financial expertise that
  may require competing with the market for the
  best
• To address high cost of transactions we will need
  to exploit opportunities that economies of scale
  presents
• We require an appropriate payment model that will
  redistribute pay points more optimally, to
  migrate people to banks where possible
• Checks and controls in the processes to prevent
  lower levels of staff processing and approving
  grants in access of R30 000, anaemic to the PFMA.
• Reconciliation of beneficiary payments that is
  lacking need to be done.
• Ensuring Compliance to regulations, business
  rules would be explicit, our recent initiatives
  to reduce fraud has indicated that with a minimal
  investment the returns are high
• Data interrogation with the most sophisticated
  statically analysis tools would be
  institutionalised

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Optimal use of infrastructure

• The findings indicate that some people still
  travel distances in access of 50km, and wait
  longer at pay points.
• We have mapped the distribution of all current
  pay points, Social Dev. offices, government
  infrastructure and financial institutions
• An efficient and optimal model will make use of
  all current available infrastructure before
  investing in new ones
• Having set norms and standards, the rules if
  applied should ensure equal access within 5 to
  7km of each individual
• However, the above proposal requires investment
  in infrastructure, to ensure people are paid in
  dignity.
• To achieve objectives we aim to migrate
  significant number of beneficiaries to banks
  where available and generate efficiencies to pay
  for current infrastructure shortages

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Concluding Remarks

• The Agency must make a difference as the
  expectation are high and benefits realisation
  significant