Foster care grants

Acess, an alliance of non-governmental organisations working to protect children’s rights, has launched a Court application in the Pretoria High Court seeking to strike down the Social Assistance Act and its Regulations’ inflexible requirement that children and/or foster parents should submit either 13-digit identity documents or birth certificates when applying for foster care and child support grants. Acess submits that many children and foster parents do not have access to the necessary documents and are therefore not paid the relevant grants. Lawyers for Human Rights applied, and were allowed, to enter these proceedings as an amicus curiae (friend of the court). At the hearing of this matter, we intend to argue that the relevant legislation does not allow access to 13-digit identity documents or birth certificates for foreign children (i.e. refugee-, asylum seeker- and undocumented foreign children). In this way the adults fostering these children, whether they are South African citizens or foreigners, are not given access to foster care grants for the benefit of the children they foster. This situation, we will submit, is in conflict with sections 9 (equality), 27 (right to social assistance) and 28 (children’s rights provisions) of the Constitution of South Africa, 1996.