from the 2007 budget Figure 12 compares the effect of latest and old grant values on the number of agents not fully-fed in the case with no HIV/AIDS. The simulations were run for a much longer period (i.e. 1500 instead of 800 time steps) as the agents do not die early due to AIDS. Unsurprisingly, the average percentage of agents not being fully-fed is higher throughout the simulation runs for the older grants. The cases in figures 11 and 12 indicate that with an increase in grants, households benefit in terms of coping with the socioeconomic stressors. However, the resulting financial constraints at the state-level can be easily anticipated and will be investigated in our further work. From the above scenarios, it is clear that the households' living depends heavily on both child grants and pensions. Households not being able to receive these grants dissolved very soon given the high cost of migration and considerably reduced village-labour. Simulation outcomes in our model are heavily dependent upon the child grant and old-age pension criteria for the agents. The reason is the unavailability of any other source of income in the case study region. A fully-fledged empirical model of the household economy is out of scope of this work. Even so, the role of grants remains highly significant to the households in the Limpopo Province ( Ziervogel et al. 2005 ). The model does reflect the fact that grants, especially the child grants, are the sole source of income for many households