One day in 2020, the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) got an unexpected call from the government. Sassa, which pays social grants to South Africans, had been identified as a Covid-19 super-spreader, the government said. The problem was the sheer size of the queues at Sassa paypoints for grant recipients.
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“We want you to solve the problem and we are giving you two weeks,” Fanie Sethokga, general manager of grants operations at Sassa, recalls being told. “Quickly, we went to the banks to see what services they have to enable us to serve clients without clients coming to us.”
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