What do South Africans really want?
What follows are the fi ndings from the survey that we undertook with ReThink Africa to determine the answers to those questions. ReThink Africa is a youth-led, pan-African social enterprise focused on applying research to shaping the discourse on development issues in Africa.
Employee benefi ts typically provide an essential form of risk mitigation for employees. Specifically, these benefits target a discontinuity of income in response to retirement, disability, death and in some instances, retrenchment. Income discontinuity, however, is not the only fi nancial risk that employees face over the course of their fi nancial journeys. Emergency savings, housing and transportation demands, educational opportunities and health crises all perpetually compete for a share of our wallets.
As such, trustees have come to appreciate that when fi nancial imperatives suggest that our members have greater priorities than retirement income, they will in many cases look to their retirement savings to fund those more urgent needs.
Our journey to the research questions
Our three overarching questions:
Our study methodology incorporated three research techniques: online surveys, semi-structured interviews and focus groups. We will discuss some of the insights and findings from the process in this chapter. We then identified and grouped the different lines of enquiry into three overarching questions which would inform the design and administration of the different research instruments.
Research question 1
What do people really want, and what can the financial services industry and other role players do to assist individuals and households along their financial journeys?
Research question 2
Is it really meaningful for the average South African to focus so doggedly on retirement savings when there has been so little focus on an individual’s overall financial journey? Could there be other ways to rethink this?
Research question 3
What might people be prepared to save for over the long term, and what would incentivise them to do so? What other key aspects beyond monthly income could employee benefits fund?
Limitations
Our research process began with the online survey administered to hundreds of employed South Africans whose employee benefits were currently being administered by the Alexander Forbes Retirement Fund (AFRF). Since the aim of the study was to capture as diverse a set of insights as possible, we also conducted a number of focus groups and semi-structured interviews with self-selected members. The sample size of respondents to the survey and focus group naturally suggests certain limitations. Despite these limitations, we feel that the research process unearthed many important insights.
Geographic
In the case of the survey, focus groups and semi-structured interviews, there is a strong provincial bias to the responses. The overwhelming majority of respondents to the different research methods were based in Gauteng. This province is the most prosperous, with exposure to primary, secondary and tertiary sectors. According to the 2011 census, the province experiences high levels of inward migration, with half the population having been born outside the province. This may be one of the factors contributing towards a particular urban and Gauteng-focused bias. The online survey did, however, have a few respondents from other provinces, in particular a handful from the Eastern Cape, Limpopo and Mpumalanga.
Demographic
The survey attempted to mirror the key demographic markers of race, gender and income. The figures of the targeted sample, however, do not wholly reflect the working population of South Africa. For example, with regard to race, the working population demographic markers are as follows: black (73.8%), white (12.4%), coloured (10.6%) and Indian or Asian (3.2%). However, our survey sample had an overrepresentation of white, Indian and Asian and an underrepresentation of black and coloured respondents.