Social Development
- What impact has the closure of Sassa offices had on the provision of social-distress relief across the Western Cape, (b) how many telephone calls has her Department received during the crisis and (c) what is the breakdown of these telephone calls by category?
(a) The closure of the SASSA offices resulted into increased workload for DSD officials which had to answer both telephonic and face to face enquires relating to social relief of distress grant. DSD officials were generally inundated with queries relating to applications for social relief due to undue hardships.
- The Department received 109 117 records for food parcels via the WCG Call Centre of these 27 868 were from duplicate cell or telephone numbers.
- The communication categories used were as follows:
Call Centre | 61870 |
DSD | 2239 |
19095 | |
Please Call Me/ SMS | 11869 |
Social Media- Facebook | 16 |
Web Portal | 8713 |
Undefined | 5315 |
Grand Total | 109117 |
The Call centre is still investigating the undefined category and possible reasons for this could be:
A system issue where at the time of submission and either as a result of the loading or connection, the field remained blank. Alternatively, on the uploading of the records (a connection issue) the channel field did not update correctly.
