Pensioners in the Free State province can look forward to receiving their pensions faster and more reliably following a major re-vamp of the province`s social security programmes.
So well designed was the province`s solution that it won a silver medal at the Capam Awards, a competition designed to acknowledge systems used to improve the lifestyle of a country`s population held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in October last year, following the Commonwealth Games.
"The solution, which consists of a new pension administration system, the re-registration of beneficiaries and a new payout system, was developed to overcome serious shortcomings in our social security services," says Johan Smith of the Free State`s Department of Social Welfare. "These included applicants having to wait between three and six months to have their pension applications approved, and substantial losses as a result of armed robberies, fraud and corruption."
It was against this bleak background that a project team was established to develop and pilot a new social security delivery systems for the Free State.
"Part of the total solution is a sub-project to re-register all the pension beneficiaries in the Province," says Smith. "This will do away with invalid and duplicate beneficiaries from the system, thus saving the Province money and eliminating fraud.
"The pilot project for the re-registration process took place in an area of Kroonstad," explains Smith. "Existing information about all the beneficiaries in the area was first downloaded onto laptop computers from the Department of Social Welfare`s Pretoria-based mainframe. Pensioners who receive their pensions from the Province were notified, and officials visited the area to re-register them.
"NATURAL LightStorm, a Software AG product supported in South Africa by SPL, part of the Dimension Data Group, was used to develop the system that handled the download and upload of data between the laptops and the mainframe," he says.
"Because of the laptops, officials could literally sit under the trees to take down all the details they needed, making it as easy as possible for the beneficiaries to reregister," says Smith. "Each beneficiary had to appear in person so that the application could be validated. In order to implement the new pay-out system, every beneficiary was also enrolled on a biometric system, which captured a photograph and fingerprints of the beneficiary. At the end of each day, the captured data was uploaded to the mainframe for processing and this new, validated data overrode the existing data." Following completion of the pilot re-registration process, the grants of over 250 beneficiaries who did not turn up for re-registration were suspended.
"This represented 3% of the total number of beneficiaries in the pilot area and translates into a saving of almost R1.5million per year," says Smith.
The pilot project was evaluated by an independent multi-disciplinary team of experts who unanimously recommended that the new systems be extended to the remainder of the Province. This recommendation was accepted, and the process of extending the project is already underway. As a result of the project`s success, the National Department of Welfare has indicated the re-registration of beneficiaries in the other provinces will also be undertaken.
By end December last year, 75 000 pensioners had already been reregistered, and almost 43 000 people were paid out by the new system.
"The new systems give a number of benefits to the people of the Free State," says Smith. "The processing of pension applications will be speeded up dramatically, and beneficiaries will be able to withdraw their pensions on any day and at any point in the Free State.
"In addition, improved security measures at paypoints will result in a safer environment for the entire community and there will be a reduction in the level of corruption in social security, resulting in substantial financial savings."
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