South Africa faces a new challenge in staving off another potential visit to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list – a lack of transparency in the Non-Profit Organisation (NPO) sector.
If the country wants trust in the NPO sector after grey-listing, it needs a living view of governance, reporting and money flows, not a static count of names. At the end of September 2025, the Department of Social Development (DSD)’s NPO register, as published by Trialogue, stood at 289,852 organisations. Twelve months earlier it was 295,051.
People assume that those totals accurately describe the sector, but they don’t. They simply denote how many names have entered the system. They say nothing about whether a registered organisation still meets, still files a report, or still does the work written into its constitution.
The Nonprofit Organisations Act never asked the register to do that job. Registration is voluntary – you submit the papers and get a number. That number has been doing a lot of work it was never designed for – letters of support, Corporate Social Investment (CSI) due diligence, the occasional bank file.
In February 2025, the DSD put some of the rot on the table. 203,279 organisations were at risk of being struck off for not sending in the annual reports required under section 18(1). Forty-one thousand notices had already gone out; 6,221 had been deregistered. The department said the clean-up sat under FATF Recommendation 8: knowing which non-profits can be used to move money that should not move, and which cannot.
South Africa left the grey list on 24 October 2025. Treasury called it 32 months of work. SARS and the Financial Intelligence Centre said, quite plainly, that this was not the end of it. The next mutual evaluation is already booked. That is the awkward part because beneficial ownership in companies has been tightened in public, but next to that sits a sector of nearly 290,000 organisations, many of which have not filed for years, and no shared way to tell a live one from a shell.
Kenya is in the same situation, only with smaller numbers and two official counts that do not agree. The Public Benefit Organisations Regulatory Authority has between 13,600 and 14,700 organisations on its books. In February 2026, it said 2,829 of roughly 12,000 had put in annual returns. In May 2025, a separate report had compliance at about 4,000 out of 14,000.
Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission had 191,278 incorporated trustees by November 2023. That was 17,177 in 2019. A tenfold jump in four years is a registration boom, not a map of working organisations.
Ghana does not even give you one number. Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) go through both the Registrar of Companies and Social Welfare. There is no single headcount a reporter can use without a footnote.
But the money has not waited for the data. Trialogue puts CSI spend in South Africa at R13.1 billion for 2025. In their company sample, 97% still pay non-profits, and those organisations take about 68% of CSI. Corporate money is the biggest slice of income in the non-profit sample they ran.
The people writing those cheques keep asking for proof, but there is no common file. Every CSI desk builds its own pack. Every bank does the same. The organisations that can produce a clean set of papers spend weeks doing it. The ones that cannot sometimes still get paid, because the alternative is to freeze.
We see a slice of this on the iZinga Assist platform. There are 369 organisations on the system. Exactly 115 have been through verification. Only 44 are visible to donors. That is not all of South Africa. It is simply what the list looks like once a registration number stops being enough. Most organisations have never been put through that filter.
What is missing is boring, which is usually a good sign. A name. Who controls the organisation. Whether it is current with the law. Whether a donation can be tracked after it leaves the donor. Until those sit in one place, the register will keep adding and dropping names, and the person with the budget will still be left guessing.
- Henk Swanepoel, Co-Founder and CEO of iZinga Assist
