South Africa has left the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list, but gaps in nonprofit reporting and verification may still leave donors, banks and regulators unable to distinguish active organisations from dormant or potentially risky entities.
South Africa faces an ongoing transparency challenge in its nonprofit organisation (NPO) sector. If the country wants to maintain trust in the sector after its grey-listing, it needs a current picture of governance, reporting and money flows — not simply a static count of registered names.
At the end of September 2025, the Department of Social Development’s NPO register, as published by Trialogue, listed 289 852 organisations. Twelve months earlier, it listed 295 051.
Those totals do not necessarily describe the size of the active sector. They show how many organisations have entered the system, but not whether they remain operational, submit reports or carry out the work set out in their constitutions.
The Nonprofit Organisations Act does not require the register to provide all that information. Registration is voluntary: organisations submit documents and receive a registration number. That number is nevertheless often used for letters of support, corporate social investment (CSI) due diligence and banking checks.
In February 2025, the Department of Social Development disclosed the scale of non-compliance. It said 203 279 organisations were at risk of being deregistered for failing to submit annual reports required under section 18(1). The department had issued 41 000 notices, while 6 221 organisations had been deregistered.
The department linked the clean-up to the requirements of FATF Recommendation 8, which concerns identifying and mitigating the risk that nonprofit organisations may be misused to finance terrorism.
South Africa was removed from the FATF’s list of jurisdictions under increased monitoring — commonly known as the grey list — on 24 October 2025.
The FATF welcomed the country’s progress but said it should continue working with the FATF and the Eastern and Southern Africa Anti-Money Laundering Group to sustain improvements in its anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing systems.
National Treasury described the process as 32 months of work. The Financial Intelligence Centre and other authorities have also stressed that removal from the grey list does not end the country’s compliance obligations.
The next mutual evaluation should be described more precisely and sourced. Treasury previously indicated that South Africa’s next evaluation was expected in 2027/28.
That leaves a potential information gap. Beneficial-ownership information for companies has been strengthened, but the NPO sector contains almost 290 000 registered names, many of which may not have submitted reports for years.
There is no single, shared system that clearly distinguishes an active organisation from a dormant one.
Other African countries face similar challenges.
Kenya’s Public Benefit Organisations Regulatory Authority has reported between 13 600 and 14 700 organisations on its records. In February 2026, it said 2 829 of about 12 000 organisations had submitted annual returns. A separate report in May 2025 put compliance at about 4 000 out of 14 000.
Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission recorded 191 278 incorporated trustees by November 2023, compared with 17 177 in 2019. The increase may indicate a registration boom, but registration figures alone do not show how many organisations remain active.
Ghana does not appear to provide one consolidated figure for the sector. Non-governmental organisations deal with both the Registrar of Companies and Social Welfare, meaning that any headcount should explain which database it uses.
The money has not waited for better data. Trialogue estimates South Africa’s CSI (corporate social investment) expenditure at R13.1 billion in 2025. Its research found that 97% of companies in its sample continued to fund nonprofit organisations, which received about 68% of CSI spending.
However, Trialogue also reports that corporate funds accounted for an average of 29% of NPO income. The article should clarify the different denominators before stating that corporate money is the largest source of nonprofit income.
Funders and banks continue to require evidence of governance, compliance and financial controls, but there is no common information file. Each CSI department and bank builds its own due-diligence pack.
Organisations that can produce complete records may spend weeks doing so. Others may still receive funding because withholding support can disrupt legitimate services.
The iZinga Assist platform provides one example of what happens when registration is supplemented by verification. The platform lists 369 organisations; 115 have been verified and 44 are visible to donors.
These figures represent only the organisations on that platform, not the South African NPO sector as a whole.
What is missing is relatively simple: the organisation’s identity, who controls it, whether it is compliant with applicable laws and whether a donation can be tracked after it leaves the donor.
Until that information is available in a reliable and accessible form, the register will continue to add and remove names without giving donors, banks or regulators a clear picture of which organisations are active and trustworthy.
Henk Swanepoel is the Co-Founder and CEO of iZinga Assist