Cape Town – The National Lotteries Board has a backlog of close to 6 000 applications for funding that amounts to more than R11bn, Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies said.
Responding to a parliamentary question from Dean Macpherson, Democratic Alliance (DA) spokesperson on trade and industry, about the state of funding applications, Davies said the Lotteries Board anticipates to have completed the backlog by the end of July this year.
Davies said there are a number of initiatives in place to “expedite” the rate of adjudication of funding, such as appointing full-time personnel at the distribution agency for all sectors of applications to increase the rate of adjudications, modernising the IT platform and re-engineering the application process to avoid backlogs in future.
Earlier this year, there were concerns that sports bodies, such as the SA Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc) would not be able to submit a funding application in 2017, after receiving its last grant of R70m in June 2016 and having to abide by a so-called “cooling-off” period before it would be able to submit a new application, the Citizen reported.
Changes to the Lotteries Act mean that there would be “cooling-off” periods between the payments granted to prevent NGOs from being reliant on Lotto funding.
The National Lotteries Board, however, said Sascoc would be eligible for another application in June this year.
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