Mar 30, 2026Confirmed
Facial-verification failures reportedly disrupted social grant access for South Africans using SASSA's eLife portal
AI loose in the worldBias and discriminationDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
South African grant beneficiaries reportedly hit repeated failures in SASSA's eLife facial-verification portal. Parliamentary reporting later listed failed facial recognition among causes of non-verification and confirmed 67,868 grant suspensions in one quarter, without saying how many came from facial failures. Affected users were sent to in-person fingerprint checks.
What this means for youWhen a government uses face scans to confirm who you are, a failed scan can delay money people depend on. If you rely on such a service, keep a backup way to verify in person and ask what to do if the scan fails.
Sources
- AI Incident Databasehttps://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1606
Data from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. IAAI-21.
Source data license: CC BY-SA 4.0 (database). Report contents keep their own rights; reports.text, submissions, images and videos are excluded from the data license.
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
This entry is record number 2295. It has not been edited since it was approved; the hash above would not match if it had. How to verify