Dr Gilad Isaacs’ address at the Making Africa’s Energy Transition Work: Local Manufacturing, Decent Work and Sustainable Livelihoods conference held on 8-9 October 2026.
Good morning, and welcome to Johannesburg and to this conference, Making Africa’s Energy Transition Work: Local Manufacturing, Decent Work and Sustainable Livelihoods. To those who have travelled from Ghana and Kenya, and from elsewhere on the continent, thank you for making the journey, and to those joining our plenary sessions online, thank you for being with us.
This is a room that does not often gather in one place. We have trade unionists and researchers, policymakers from three countries, manufacturers and small business owners, and people from civil society and community organisations. That mix is deliberate. The questions we will discuss over the next two days cannot be answered by any one of these constituencies alone, and part of what we hope to build here is a set of relationships that will outlast the conference itself.
I want to extend a particular welcome to our project partners: the Congress of South African Trade Unions; the African Centre for Technology Studies in Kenya; and, from Ghana, the Africa Centre for Energy Policy, A Rocha Ghana and the World Energy Council’s Future Energy Leaders. Together with the Institute for Economic Justice, these organisations have carried this work over the past several years, and it is a real pleasure to have all of you here in Johannesburg.
I want to begin by saying a little about where this project comes from. In July 2022, the International Development Research Centre issued a call for research on how small and medium enterprises, and the women and young people who work in and run them, could drive and benefit from a clean energy transition. Among the policy questions the call listed were local content requirements, public procurement, and unfair competition and abusive market power, and it proposed that women’s disproportionate burden of unpaid care be treated as a structural barrier rather than an afterthought. Four years on, those are precisely the questions our research has found to matter most. I want to thank IDRC both for its support and for the judgement that framed this work in the first place.
At that time, the organisations in this partnership were, for the most part, organisations that knew of one another rather than organisations that knew one another. Today, across three countries, we have become a genuine working consortium. Since our inception workshop in early 2024, we have held stakeholder meetings in all three countries, opened the project publicly with a symposium in October 2024, undertaken fieldwork and firm surveys, held policy dialogues in Mombasa, Nairobi and Kisumu, and convened a dialogue on building local value in Ghana’s energy transition in Accra this June. The organisations themselves have also changed over this time. The IEJ, for instance, is roughly three times the size it was when that call arrived, and this project has become one of the central areas of our work.
Over the next two days you will hear what we have found. Today begins with a roundtable of South Africa’s trade union federations on the role of organised labour in localisation, continues with case studies from Kenya, South Africa and Ghana, and ends with a discussion of how labour and industry might work together on green industrial policy. Tomorrow we turn to the state and the difficulty of coordinating energy, industrial, trade and environmental policy, to what can be learned from China’s rise as the dominant manufacturer of renewable energy technology, and finally to advocacy, where we will try to identify the policy moments in each country where this work can make a difference. I will not attempt to summarise the findings now. Instead, I want to use a few minutes to say why I think this work matters at this particular moment.
When the IDRC call was issued in 2022, the just transition was approached largely as a question of advancing renewables roll-out to mitigate climate emissions and managing the decline of coal, and how wealthy countries might help pay for that. South Africa’s Just Energy Transition Partnership, agreed at COP26 the year before, was the emblem of that approach. The world was also absorbing a fuel price shock following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, South Africa was entering its worst period of loadshedding on record, and in August of that year the United States passed the Inflation Reduction Act, signalling that the wealthiest economies had rediscovered industrial policy for themselves. The question at the heart of this project, whether African countries could build productive capacity around the energy transition rather than simply purchase it, was beginning to be taken seriously again. But it was still largely a question about the future.
Four years later, it is a question about the present. The transition has arrived on this continent faster than almost anyone planned. Estimates suggest that Africa will install a record 17 gigawatts of solar this year, an increase of 45%, with 36 of the continent’s 54 countries expected to install more than ever before. Most of this is not large utility projects but distributed generating capacity. And whereas South Africa accounted for half of the continent’s solar imports in 2023, its share has now fallen to a fifth. This is a genuinely continental transformation, which is one reason why a project spanning Ghana, Kenya and South Africa matters.
But the transition has arrived largely on terms set elsewhere. Around 94% of the solar panels installed in Africa are imported from China, and the new manufacturing capacity being built on the continent is often aimed at export rather than at African markets. The pattern our own concept note warned of, in which African countries export raw materials and import high-value technology while value and capability are retained elsewhere, risks being reproduced in the very industries that were meant to offer an alternative.
The context has also been reshaped by another war and another energy shock. After the war on Iran began at the end of February, oil prices rose by roughly 40%, fuel-importing African economies faced shortages and rising inflation, and growth forecasts across the continent were cut. Solar has become an urgent response, and rightly so. But if we replace dependence on imported fuel with dependence on imported equipment, we will have gained only a partial and fragile kind of security. Energy sovereignty requires not only installed capacity but productive capacity, skills, and the ability to shape the industries that supply us.
At the same time, the rules of the global economy have been unsettled. What began as a revival of industrial policy in the North has hardened into tariffs and trade fragmentation. This has accelerated the emergence of geopolitical blocs, in which energy systems are a defining feature. The US hegemon has doubled down on a fossil fuel–dollar nexus. Europe continues to advance the energy transition but is increasingly preoccupied with its own economic stagnation. And Chinese manufacturers, facing barriers in Europe and the United States, are redirecting their output to Africa, with Chinese solar exports to the continent rising by more than 80% year on year in April.
Despite this shifting context, the risk for Africa remains remarkably similar to that of previous epochs: serving as a site of cheap mineral extraction while re-importing advanced technology, a pattern that entrenches underdevelopment. Cheap imported panels and batteries do expand access to electricity, cut the cost of diesel for households and small firms, and help countries weather this year’s energy shock. But we cannot be pressured into a false choice between affordability and industrial development. Rather, we need to design policy, through procurement, local content, finance, trade and support for small enterprises, so that we are not forced to give up one for the other.
The decisions taken in the next few years, about what is procured, from whom and on what terms, will determine whether this transition entrenches the old pattern or begins to build something different: local and regional manufacturing capabilities, decent work, and a transition in which women are not simply absorbing its costs through unpaid care while others capture its gains. In 2022, this was a research question. Today it is a question that demands decisions, and the evidence we have assembled is meant to inform them.
Before I hand over, I want to thank everyone who has made this project and this conference possible: our partners and their research teams in Ghana, Kenya and South Africa; the workers, firms, officials and community members who gave their time to our research; the members of our reference groups; the speakers, discussants and facilitators who will guide us over the next two days; and the colleagues who organised this conference and took care of the travel, logistics and many details that make a gathering like this work. And thank you all for being here.
Let me end with one special word of thanks. When the IDRC call arrived, I spent an entire night drafting the proposal with my colleague, Dr Basani Baloyi. Basani has since been the constant anchor of this project, holding together partners across three countries and seeing the work through from that first draft to this conference. It is fitting that she should open our discussions, and so it is my pleasure to hand over to her for the trade union roundtable.
Thank you.
