Studies on benefit take-up regularly find non-take-up rates in the order of 40% or more, indicating a significant combined deterrent effect of the various barriers. ( Since SA benefits are meant to alleviate poverty but are often not taken up, it is useful to take a closer look at the fraction of poor people that these benefits reach. To illustrate orders of magnitude, Figure 2 combines administrative data on benefit recipients with survey-based totals of the number of income-poor households. The resulting proportions are ‘pseudo coverage rates’, in the sense that they express the relative sizes of two groups that overlap only partially (some non-poor households may receive SA benefits).