Power, People, and Productivity: Skills Development for South Africa’s Just Energy Transition

Just over 60 million people call South Africa home; at the same time, the country faces an unemployment rate of 33.2%, alongside persistent inequality, entrenched poverty, and economic stagnation. The Just Energy Transition (JET) presents a critical opportunity to address some of these structural challenges. While the JET is not a panacea, it offers scope to simultaneously strengthen energy security, stimulate the economy and job creation, and address long-standing skills constraints. In what the International Energy Agency terms the “Age of Electricity”, global demand for clean energy is accelerating, and it will not wait for South Africa’s education and skills systems to adjust. Failure to proactively align human capital development with the energy transition risks entrenching existing inequalities and creating new ones, undermining long-term inclusive growth. This paper argues that skills debates surrounding the energy transition must place greater emphasis on basic education, alongside post-school education and training, despite its relative neglect in the existing literature. This paper employs a qualitative policy analysis and develops a conceptual framework linking basic education, skills formation, labour market outcomes, and the energy transition to economic growth. A constraint-based diagnostic approach is used to identify key bottlenecks in South Africa’s energy skills pipeline. As a result, this paper identifies four interlinked reform levers. First, it recommends a clearly mandated convening authority to align education, skills, energy, and labour-market policies. Second, it highlights basic education as a foundational constraint, calling for the integration of JET-relevant content to expand the future skills pipeline. Third, it points to misalignment in post-school education and training, motivating reforms to SETAs and deeper public-private collaboration. Finally, it emphasises the need for stronger and more decentralised industry participation in skills development. Together, these recommendations emerge from tracing how weaknesses in education, skills formation, and coordination shape employment outcomes, energy security, and long-run economic growth under the energy transition. Inglesi-Lotz, R., Kritzinger, W., Nkuna, V., & Nqosa, T. (2026). Power, people, and productivity: Skills development for South Africa’s just energy transition (ERSA Policy Paper No. 47). Economic Research Southern Africa. https://doi.org/10.71587/2tx4qz05