Author: Henk Swanepoel

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.…