The National Lotteries Commission (NLC) regulates various lotteries in South Africa, including the national Lottery and sports pools. It also serves as a grant funder, providing registered not-for-profit entities with funding for good causes, and to establish and implement a wide variety of projects.

Grants are awarded under four different categories: Arts and Culture, Charities, Sport and Recreation, and Miscellaneous. Grants are generally application-driven, although an amendment to the Lotteries Act  introduced pro-active funding, allowing the Minister of Trade and Industry, the NLC or its board to identify projects to fund without receiving a grant application.

This Lottery tool was built by OpenUp, a Cape Town based civic tech organisation, to help make information about Lottery grants more transparent and keyword searchable. All the information in the tool is from publicly available NLC annual reports.

Please note that the NLC’s reporting in annual reports about grants has often differed from year-to-year. In some years, the details published in the annual reports may exclude key information, like project numbers, the province where the grantee is based and the sector under which the grant was awarded.

You can find an archive of stories done using this tool for some of the research here and here.  If you have any feedback, suggestions for functions you think would be useful, or to report a bug please mail us on salottotool@gmail.com.