South Africa's Just Energy Transition is often touted as one of the largest investment opportunities in the nation's democratic history, with government estimates placing the financing requirement at about R1.5 trillion. Yet, for all the attention paid to the scale of the capital involved, far less consideration has been given to what participation in that transition might look like.
Much of the discourse surrounding the socioeconomic dimensions of the transition has focused on managing the consequences of decarbonisation for workers and communities dependent on coal. It is often within this context that young people, women and other groups vulnerable to economic exclusion enter the conversation, given the legitimate concern that the costs of the transition could fall disproportionately on those least able to absorb them. Inevitably, though, this framing places greater emphasis on the impact of the transition on these groups than on the role they might play in driving it.
In a country where youth unemployment stood at an alarming 45.6% in the first quarter of 2026, there are 1.5 trillion reasons to think more deliberately about the role young people will play in the transition.
Broadly speaking, this is a theme that appears throughout much of South Africa's transition planning. The Just Energy Transition Investment Plan, for example, proposes the allocation of R2.65 billion towards skills investment priorities while explicitly recognising the need to develop the ecosystems required to support innovation and broaden access to transition-related opportunities for young people, women and small businesses. So too does the South African Renewable Energy Masterplan, which targets the creation of 25 000 jobs in renewable energy and battery energy storage component manufacturing, with young people expected to account for half that figure. It also proposes employee share ownership schemes to advance transformation across these sectors.
But recognising the importance of youth participation and creating the conditions for it are not necessarily the same thing.
Mostly absent from these frameworks are hard youth quotas, ring-fenced youth enterprise finance, procurement set-asides, youth ownership requirements, age-disaggregated reporting and accountability mechanisms through which youth participation can be enforced and overseen. This is not a challenge confined to South Africa, though; it is difficult to find instances anywhere in the world where youth participation extends beyond skills development and training into deliberate policy interventions around capital allocation and procurement that influence who benefits from transition-related investment.
If South Africa genuinely believes the Just Energy Transition represents a once-in-a-generation economic restructuring, youth participation cannot be treated as a social outcome that follows the transition. It has to become one of the conditions for success.
Part of that requires a broader understanding of where opportunities for participation are likely to emerge. Renewable energy generation and storage may attract much of the attention but the transition also depends on the expansion of grid and municipal electricity infrastructure, the growth of decentralised energy systems, battery deployment, energy efficiency services, environmental management and the thousands of businesses that will supply goods and services to these activities. In many cases, the opportunity may not lie within large-scale projects but in the supply chains that develop around them.
Young people need visibility of where these opportunities are emerging, a clearer understanding of the pathways into them and access to the support required to pursue them.
These are the kinds of considerations that have informed a growing number of local and international initiatives, including the National Gender Equal and Inclusive Just Transition Coalition, which brings together civil society organisations and corporate programmes focused on advancing inclusion and, with support from the World Bank, seeks to promote innovative models for the socioeconomic inclusion of women, youth and marginalised groups in South Africa's transition.
History has shown that periods of large-scale economic restructuring have a habit of rewarding those who are already positioned to participate in them.
Without deliberate intervention, there is nothing inherently automatic about a transition translating into meaningful economic participation for those currently excluded from the economy. Much of what determines whether young people benefit from the transition will need to be decided before the rest of the R1.5 trillion is deployed.
David Tigere Mparutsa is the deputy chairperson of National Gender Equal and Inclusive Just Transition Coalition