Why is the inclusion of women essential to building a sustainable, resilient and inclusive energy future?
The focus of my work is alleviating energy poverty, which cuts across a range of households in low-income contexts. Informal settlements, some connected to electricity and some not. In older City-supplied settlements about 93% of residents are connected to electricity but after a huge increase in unlawful occupation over the Covid-19 period, a vast number of new settlements were formed, the majority in high-risk areas that we are unable to electrify. This includes on private land, in wetlands and flood plains, sand dunes and nature reserves and under power infrastructure. So access is an issue and also affordability.
Low-cost State-subsidy housing. Backyard dwellings where residents depend on a landlord for access and often pay more for it than a formal customer would. In most of these homes it is women who are the decision-makers when it comes to energy. They decide what to buy and how to use it: what to cook on, how to keep a child warm, and how to stretch a supply that runs out before month-end. When the money runs low, it is women who make the hard trade-offs. They move from electricity or gas down to paraffin, candles or wood, and sometimes forgo nutritious staples like samp and beans, which take a lot of energy to cook, in favour of instant noodles because they are quicker and cheaper to prepare. Without electricity there is no fridge, so there is the constant worry of food spoiling and the daily puzzle of how to iron school uniforms. Paraffin and illegal connections carry their own costs: fire risks and smoke that leaves young children coughing and wheezing. A working mother is often up before dawn, dropping her child at the crèche and walking to a 5am transport through unlit pathways before her own day has even begun. That is an energy problem she is carrying, even though we rarely name it as one.
So including women is not about adding a special-interest group to the table. Women are already running these energy systems every day; they know which fuel they can fall back on when the money runs out and which pathway is too dark to walk. When we plan without that knowledge, we build programmes or infrastructure that do not fit how people actually live and are not responsive to community needs. When we plan with the knowledge of women, we get energy solutions that work in the real conditions of these homes, that households can afford to keep using, and that reach the people who need them most. As a municipality, we are closest to these households, and part of our job is to make sure that knowledge actually shapes what gets planned, funded and built. That is what makes an energy future sustainable, resilient and inclusive, and it is why it has to be built with women in mind.
From your perspective, what progress have you seen in advancing women’s participation and leadership within the energy sector over recent years?
A lot of my day-to-day interactions are with women. My manager is a woman, and so is our director, and from what I gather in conversation with them, there has been a real shift over the years, even if barriers remain. That shift matters, because so much of women’s expertise sits in exactly the areas, such as energy poverty alleviation, that have moved to the centre of the agenda, and that has opened up genuine room to lead. My manager has consistently opened doors for me through training, conferences and opportunities to participate in policy processes, and our Director has been a strong advocate for my growth and development, creating an environment where staff are encouraged to contribute, take on leadership opportunities and engage in work beyond their immediate job descriptions. That is part of how I have come to co-chair energy poverty sub-workstreams in the JET municipal portfolio and help shape policy conversations.
That growth has not come from individual support alone, though. It comes from a departmental culture that encourages learning, innovation and participation, which shows up in practical ways: managing the City’s relationships across partners such as C40, GreenCape, the Resilient Cities network and Economic Development Partnership, and through that, meeting and collaborating with other women doing this work across different organisations. Being trusted to represent the City externally and engaged with national and international stakeholders in those spaces has been meaningful, a better measure of progress.
Seeing women in leadership positions who are actively shaping Cape Town’s energy future has also been important personally, as it provides a visible example of the role women can play across the full energy value chain, from strategy and policy to implementation and service delivery.
Beyond our department, though, the picture is more uneven. Most of my interactions with technical, generation and grid staff are still with men, and the same holds across the energy businesses and service providers we work with. There are women in community engagement, monitoring and evaluation, and stakeholder engagement, often the ones building trust on the ground, but ownership, senior management and technical roles on the private-sector side remain largely male.
The area I think deserves the most deliberate attention, though, is the voice of female users themselves. Women are the primary energy decision-makers in most of the households we serve, yet they are not automatically the ones consulted when solutions are designed. In our own work we have started to correct for this, deliberately centring women’s experiences in how we shape interventions, but across the sector it is still more the exception than the rule.
Can you share an example of an initiative or intervention that has successfully supported women in energy and created meaningful impact?
The co-design process behind the Sustainable Energy Markets Department’s solar public lighting pilot in Marikana, an informal settlement in Philippi, Cape Town, is a good example, precisely because of how it was done. The pilot is a collaboration between the City, the National Department of Science, Technology and Innovation, and the Technology Innovation Agency, and it is currently at the procurement stage. What sets it apart is that the team spent a full year on design before reaching that point, and that year centred on the community, especially women and their experience of living without public lighting. The settlement is not connected to the electricity grid as it came about from unlawful occupation on privately-owned land. The City had to spend years in a land acquisition process. Although the City did install high mast public lighting on the peripheries it was vandalised frequently and constantly repaired at high cost, leaving the community in darkness.
Thus residents have relied on informal connections, so this project focused on finding new technology for lighting the pathways at night.
Across that year we ran a series of design activities to gather residents’ views, understand the priority areas, and account for the engineering constraints.
Public lighting is a real challenge in Marikana, and it is connected to many other services and to the overall wellbeing of the community. The majority of residents reported feeling unsafe after dark, and women carry that risk most directly. What they reported included mothers walking children to a 5am transport through pitch-dark pathways. Women are attacked on the way back from communal toilets at night, with some avoiding the toilets altogether because the walk is too dangerous. A woman who finishes a shift in the city at midnight and has to pay a man to walk her home from where her transport drops her, because the last stretch alone is not safe. Some women will only go to the bus stop or taxi rank if a man goes with them. Women running crèches and small home shops who cannot safely operate in the dark, including those who take in children before dawn.
Because we approached it as co-design, the residents determined where the lights should go and which pathways carried the most risk, since they navigate them daily. The result is a design decided by the people who bear the risk rather than one imposed from our office, which makes it both better targeted and more likely to last. That is the shift worth naming: the priority areas for the lighting solution came from the community, women included, which is what it means to shape the solution.
How can organisations create environments where women are empowered to thrive, lead and contribute meaningfully across the energy value chain?
Two things matter, and they work best together. The first is supporting women in the technical part of the energy value chain, i.e., the engineers and grid specialists, the people designing and building the systems. That comes down to being deliberate about who is hired into those roles, who is offered technical training and who is developed toward leadership, because those are the points where career pipelines tend to narrow.
The second is making sure the parts of the value chain where many women currently contribute are recognised and resourced as skilled work so that they become genuine routes to leadership rather than side roles. Community engagement and the social design of a project are demanding disciplines, and when they carry the same weight and resourcing as an engineering scope, the women doing that work have somewhere to grow into.
Mentorship supports both so that experience is passed on intentionally. And because the hardest energy problems sit where the technical, the social and the political meet, organisations benefit from people who can move across all three. Those that enable women to lead across the whole value chain, from the grid to the last mile, tend to make better decisions, simply because they are drawing on the full range of expertise the work requires.
What opportunities do you see for women to play a greater role in shaping South Africa’s energy transition?
South Africa’s energy transition will be measured by how just it is, and to understand that we have to ask who carries the burdens of the current energy system, who gets a say in changing it, and whose knowledge and needs are recognised as legitimate. On each of these, women have both the strongest stake and the most to contribute, which is precisely why they should be shaping the transition rather than receiving it.
Take the burden first. Women in low-income households carry the heaviest energy burden under the current system, so they have to be part of designing what a fairer one delivers on access and affordability. Imagine, for instance, an energy subsidy designed around the people who actually manage household energy. On the question of who gets a say, these are the rooms where it is decided who actually benefits, and women in local government and communities should be leading those conversations, not consulted once the choices have been made. And on recognition, women hold detailed, practical knowledge of how energy works in these households, and that knowledge needs to be treated as evidence that shapes design.
This matters because a transition can decarbonise the grid and still fail the households who need it most. Getting the justice dimension right is what prevents that, and women are central to getting it right. So the opportunity is not simply for more women to participate. It is for women to help define what a just transition means and how it is delivered.
