Wits Launches ENERGISE Centre to Power Africa's Just Transition

The University of the Witwatersrand has launched a new African-German research centre dedicated to one of the continent's defining economic challenges: achieving a Just Energy Transition without leaving communities behind.

The ENERGISE Centre — the full name is ENabling a Just Energy Transition through Renewable Energy, Governance, and Innovative Sustainable Entrepreneurship — was unveiled on 23 September 2026, following its inaugural Annual Symposium held at Wits from 14–17 September in Johannesburg. The initiative is funded through the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), with backing from the German Federal Foreign Office (AA) and the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR).

The four-day symposium convened researchers, academics, policymakers, industry representatives and other stakeholders from South Africa, Germany and beyond. Their mandate: to explore the opportunities and challenges tied to a Just Energy Transition in South Africa, where the shift away from coal carries steep social and economic stakes.

Wits University describes the partnership as a vehicle to link research, entrepreneurship and policy in tackling some of the continent's toughest energy challenges. That framing matters for business readers. The centre is not a pure academic exercise; its design explicitly couples scholarship with enterprise and governance, the three levers that determine whether renewable energy investment translates into jobs, firms and functioning institutions.

The symposium programme showcased ENERGISE's work across four pillars: interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, postgraduate education, innovation, and Living Labs. The Living Labs model is notable because it embeds research in real-world settings rather than keeping it confined to the university. It also served to strengthen collaboration and knowledge exchange across the partner institutions, according to the university.

For South Africa, the timing is consequential. A Just Energy Transition is, at its core, an economic restructuring problem: how to decarbonise power generation while protecting workers and regions dependent on carbon-intensive industries. The ENERGISE Centre's architecture — combining renewable energy expertise, governance studies and sustainable entrepreneurship — maps directly onto that problem set. Its entrepreneurship strand signals an intention to seed businesses capable of commercialising clean-energy solutions, not merely to publish research on them.

The German funding structure reinforces the bilateral character of the project. DAAD, the country's academic exchange agency, channels money from the Federal Foreign Office and the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space — a combination that ties scientific cooperation to broader German engagement with African partners. For German industry and policy circles, the centre offers a foothold in one of the most significant energy-transition markets on the continent.

The inaugural symposium also set the rhythm for what is intended to be an annual event, giving partners a recurring platform to align research agendas, showcase postgraduate training outcomes and test policy ideas with industry in the room.

The centre's early test will be execution: converting an ambitious interdisciplinary mandate — spanning renewables, governance and entrepreneurship — into research outputs, trained postgraduates and viable ventures that measurably advance South Africa's transition. The next Annual Symposium will offer the first public checkpoint on that progress.