Futures Cape

This project resulted in three publications, "Educating Cape 2040: Building Blocks of Future Prosperity," "Green Cape 2040: Towards a Smarter Grid," and "Enterprising Cape: Building an Inclusive and Vibrant Economy."

Educating Cape 2040: Building Blocks of Future Prosperity: This brief explores potential development paths for Western Cape education through 2040. The Base Case forecast envisions steady improvements in the retention of learners across all grades and levels of education, but the relatively slow pace of improvement threatens to leave yet another generation of learners without a complete, high-quality education. To address this, the authors identify two policy options: an expansion of the Early Childhood Development initiative, and the introduction of specialised supplementary teacher training courses.

Green Cape 2040: Towards a Smarter Grid: Electricity is crucial for the economic and social development of South Africa, but disruptive changes loom on the horizon. It is now clear that Eskom is unlikely to keep its electricity prices lower than those of alternative forms of electricity production, most notably small-scale photovoltaic (PV). This analysis finds that a significant amount of revenue will be lost to PV uptake, but that policies aimed at investing in advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and other smart technologies, changing the tariff structure and encouraging economic growth from domestic PV manufacturing, can reduce this loss.

Enterprising Cape: Building an Inclusive and Vibrant Economy: The Western Cape faces two interrelated sets of development challenges in its efforts to become a more cohesive high-income society and economy. The first is unequal access to basic services and economic opportunities. The second is an economic environment with inadequate technology, skills, and governance to enable it to move rapidly from middle-income to high-income status. This FuturesCape policy brief analyses these two sets of challenges and explores some of the outcomes of pursuing policies designed to address them – first in isolation and then in combination. It compares these outcomes with a Base Case, which is how the future might be if no significant changes were made to the Western Cape’s current mix of policy strategies. Under such a Base Case scenario, the Western Cape won’t reach high-income status until around 2040.