A survey by online cash lender Wonga South Africa has now given a hard figure to something many South Africans could have intuitively felt in their budgets over the last year: credit has ceased to be an emergency and now operates as a default burden for many.
Wonga’s annual survey of credit utilisation received data from 4,872 South Africans and found that 41% of respondents utilise credit every month for basic needs including electricity, transport and food.
What is more notable however is the trend in the informal sector. Dependency on loans from mashonisas i.e. unregistered informal lenders not covered by the South Africa’s credit regulator – has more than doubled in a year, rising from 15% of respondents in Wonga’s 2025 survey to 32% in the current survey.
Around a third of consumers are now turning to lenders outside the protection of the provisions of the National Credit Act including affordability assessments, interest rate limitations and dispute processes.
Tina Manyanya, spokesperson for Wonga, described the change as an effect of a financially stretched population. In this socio-economic climate an increasingly large proportion of people are unable to meet their most basic needs without borrowing and that borrowing is encroaching upon capacity to save or plan for the future. The reason for the increase in mashonisa use is no secret – It is mostly a story about the closure of formal credit doors to a worryingly large number of people.
68% of respondents reported having been denied a cash loan via a formal credit channel at least once and over half of those who were denied indicated a low credit score as the reason for the denial, on the other side of that coin the individuals who had actually obtained credit from a mashonisa, 85% cited their low credit score as the reason for using the loan shark.
This evidence is clear: denial of a loan does not mean a person no longer needs it; it only means that the loan in question will lack the typical legal protections. Manyanya is describing a structural flaw of the system, not a feature of lending practice. When people who depend on credit are denied access to regulated lending, they are diverted into the informal lending sector. The issue here is not a feature of lending practice but a lack of affordable and formal lending opportunities for individuals who fail to meet the criteria for a traditional credit score, despite having the income capability to make responsible loans.
The survey also highlights the thinning of the financial safety net in general. According to the stats, 81% of people do not have enough money set aside to cover even one month of their salary and 51% use credit in order to cover unexpected expenses like car repairs or medical bills. Alongside these troubling statistics is a somewhat encouraging glimmer:
51% of people reported having some type of retirement, provident or pension savings. This indicates that long term savings are still occurring even though short-term savings have thinned.
Further data released this year supports this trend. Households in South Africa now carry 62.2% of their disposable income in debt according to the Reserve Bank in the first quarter of 2026 compared to 61.8% in the previous quarter. A DebtBusters survey of 18,000 consumers found that 53% of consumers now pay over 40% of their take home income towards debt compared to 48% a year ago. René Moonsamy from the National Debt Counselling Association has noted that the problem is not overconsumption but a failure for income to keep up with the cost of living. The gap caused by stagnant incomes is being filled by an increased use of two-pot retirement savings.
All this data illustrates a credit market in which the informal sector is more so soaking up the people that formal lenders have turned away rather than competing against them. This trend is expected to continue until the availability of low cost and regulated credit expands to meet the level of need.