In 2022, South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission adopted a framework for a Just Transition: a roadmap for shifting the country’s economy from fossil fuels to cleaner energies and reducing carbon emissions in a socially equitable way. But to enact a truly just energy transition (that is, greening the economy in a way that ensures that people and communities are also brought along) requires collective engagement from citizen activists – and from civil society organisations supporting them.

Project 90 by 2030 is one such organisation. With a name and mission inspired by British journalist and activist George Monbiot’s call for a 90% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030,[1] Project 90 is a Cape Town-based social and environmental justice organisation aimed at ‘inspiring and mobilising South African society towards a sustainably developed and equitable low-carbon future by means of a Just Energy Transition.’ They take a three-pronged approach, engaging young people who will live with the effects of current policy choices; under-represented and under-resourced people who struggle to access basic services and will bear the brunt of climate catastrophe; and civil society, labour unions, and community groups who shape the future of energy policy.

In other words, their work engages policy-makers and stakeholders, but also focuses on developing people and communities’ abilities to engage government and the public themselves: addressing the intersectional issues of energy poverty, social injustice, and climate change that affect them directly. Though South Africa at large has an electrification rate over 90% (as of 2023 data), the wealth disparity means that this is not evenly distributed, with 40% of the nation’s population experiencing energy poverty – in large part due to lack of affordability.[2]

Adding sources of renewable energy generation into the mix on all scales is essential not only to reduce carbon emissions, but also to aid in increasing municipal energy security, as well as creating jobs in the renewable energy sector (combatting high unemployment). But in order to inspire and mobilise a shift toward renewable energy, communities need and deserve knowledge about climate change, and why clean energy is needed – and how this issue relates to their lives in the face of other day-to-day challenges. As Natalie Mc Askill, Project 90 by 2030’s Community Partnership Programme lead and facilitator, notes: ‘People are hustling to put bread on the table.’

Mc Askill came up in the anti-apartheid youth movement – some of the community activists participating in Project 90’s programming are people she’s known for several decades. Back then, as she puts it, community development work was part of the anti-apartheid struggle. Today, community development work remains inextricable from the work of rewriting violent systemic legacies and moving toward a sustainable, fair future for all.

Back in 2004, sociologist Jacklyn Cock predicted that South Africa’s then-nascent environmental justice movement would emerge to be a ‘weblike universe made up of highly interconnected networks’,[3] essentially, a coalition of grassroots nodes – sitting at the confluence of the intersecting struggles of racism, poverty and inequality, and environmental preservation. Over 20 years later, this assessment feels accurate. Project 90 is one of those nodes: with programmes like the Energy SMART Citizens in Action project, in which grassroots organisers participate in dialogues, connection-building, community mapping exercises, and media/storytelling training to help them bridge the gap between community movements, civil society, and local government.

31 years post-democratic transition, Cape Town remains a spatially stratified city. Neoliberal governance means that municipal infrastructure and resource allocation often fall on the same historic racial and socioeconomic lines, perpetuating an endemic cycle of systematic under-resourcing. Before and during apartheid,[4] communities of colour were forcibly removed from Cape Town’s city centre and other desirable suburban areas, and relegated to the Cape Flats: an arid expanse of land on the peri-urban edge of the city. Sociologist Zachary Levenson, whose research focuses on race and class in postcolonial democracies, writes that Cape Town’s housing distribution ‘has ultimately functioned to fix already marginalised – and racialised – populations to the urban periphery.’[5] This peripheralisation is true not only of housing but also of household electricity, a major concern for many people. And uneven electricity tariff tiers can heavily impact many South Africans’ access and affordability to electricity.[6]

Aloma Matthews, 62, lives in Hanover Park in the Cape Flats, where she leads the Hanover Park Women’s Collective: working to mobilise her community around access to affordable electricity and to demonstrate the intersectionality baked into injustice. She has participated in two Project 90 programmes over the past several years. The first was an 18-month programme focusing on climate change, with two or three representatives each representing about 12 different grassroots communities, meeting once a week. It was about ‘getting to a baseline on where the consciousness was, and where this group sees needs, in terms of a transition to cleaner energy,’ Matthews recalls. ‘At the close of this intervention, this group were basically looking at options for how we can influence decision-makers and municipalities, and establishing where they were at in terms of providing alternative energy.’

A few years later, she was recruited into a group of women that was specifically focused on income generation in the context of energy and sustainability. The group formally partnered with Project 90 at the start of 2024, with Project 90’s team offering workshops on the energy transition and on how to deal with current electricity challenges. A major challenge in her community, Matthews explains, is that the municipality had installed prepaid meter boxes in peoples’ homes, and then proceeded to do debt collection – for other debts, like unpaid water bills – from these households’ prepaid electricity. Project 90 helped with community education on electricity tariffs; Matthews offered guidance on how to seek debt relief from the city; and the women brainstormed how they might generate income from home while reducing household energy expenditure and costs. ‘The idea was to look at products we can make or design or create from waste to generate alternative energy,’ Matthews says: ‘products we would be able to use for cooking, or creating small solar devices which people can use for charging phones: saving energy costs and also transitioning to cleaner energy.’ The result has been income generation that helps defray the cost of electricity and debts, while also reducing household carbon footprints.

Looking ahead at Hanover Park Women’s Collective’s involvement with Project 90, the issues at hand remain the same: ‘Policy about [the Just] Transition is not involving communities,’ Matthews says, ‘and not just not involving communities, but also keeping out local communities, and putting red tape in terms of service providers. Those are the challenges that we’re dealing with.’

‘As young people, we are afraid to stand up about the issue of houses because it’s not for us, it’s for our parents. But we forget that it also affects you,’ says Feziwe Sigqumo, 35, about the links between housing, energy, and environmental justice. ‘When it comes time to study, or to wash – how can you wash when there’s no water, how can you study when there’s no light? How can you read when there’s a leaking roof, or no roof?’

At 17, immediately after finishing school, Sigqumo saw a need in her community of Mandela Park.[7] The queue for government-subsidised Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) housing was opaque and backlogged. Lots, earmarked for RDP construction, lay vacant.[8] ‘We saw an opportunity,’ she recalls, for the community to reclaim the vacant spaces and build houses themselves. Sigqumo became the first chairperson of the Mandela Park Backyarders: a social movement comprising the area’s poor and marginalised residents that works towards housing rights and against evictions. And she joined the Housing Assembly, a city-wide coalition of community groups addressing housing inequality. It was through this that she met Project 90, and went on to undertake their climate change programme in 2024.

Since participating in Project 90’s programming, Sigqumo has found that her community is better equipped to speak on the roles and challenges that climate and energy play in their lives at Housing Assembly meetings, in collaboration with other movements and occupations, and by using creative storytelling methods like podcasts, video, and photos. Young people, Sigqumo reflects, now have the language and tools to talk about the issues they face, and how climate change is affecting them. Mc Askill confirms this, citing participant evaluations to say it’s safe to claim that Project 90 is developing budding climate activists.

Moving forward in collaboration with Project 90, Sigqumo says, the goal is more community storytelling. Now that young people have received training in writing and interviewing, it’s time to put these skills to use – and it’s time for communities to tell their own stories, in their own words.

Addressing the energy transition in Cape Town means addressing it through a lens that prioritises equity – and people. For a sustainable transition to also be sustainable for communities, national and municipal government must prioritise investing in communities. Since the Project 90 programme, Sigqumo reports, she feels more confident in talking to people about her story and the issues she’s fighting for: ‘We are fighting for our rights to have a place to stay. It is written in the constitution of South Africa, but it’s not happening today. The constitution is only helping people that have money and have power. But for us, it’s not helping us. So we have to stand up for our own selves.’