studies on benefit takeup regularly find nontakeup rates in the order of or more indicating a significant combined deterrent effect of the various barriers since sa benefits are meant to alleviate poverty but are often not taken up it is useful to take a closer look at the fraction of poor people that these benefits reach to illustrate orders of magnitude figure combines administrative data on benefit recipients with surveybased totals of the number of incomepoor households the resulting proportions are pseudo coverage rates in the sense that they express the relative sizes of two groups that overlap only partially some nonpoor households may receive sa benefits