iShack Project
The iShack Project is a South African social enterprise that provides off-grid solar electricity to low-income residents of informal settlements who do not have grid-electrification.
This energy service is a spin-out from a much broader programme of applied research at the Sustainability Institute that explored the idea of incremental service-delivery for informal settlement households in South Africa who often wait for many years, if not decades, before receiving conventional basic services. The research question was: “what alternative services could be provided while they wait?”.
In 2011 a group of postgraduate students focused on the challenge of upgrading informal settlements through research on energy, water, sanitation, and waste.
By 2012, with support from the NRF via the TSAMA Hub, a dedicated core team formed and the work started gaining wider recognition.
Their research culminated in the iShack pilot project launched in Enkanini in 2013, where 20 shacks were retrofitted with solar home systems designed to provide lighting, television, and security features.
By 2017, iShack was delivering pay-as-you-go solar electricity to around 1,500 households in Enkanini under a renewed municipal contract, with hardware funded by grants and running costs covered by subsidies. That same year, the project expanded to Siqalo in Cape Town with a pilot ‘Help to Buy’ scheme that supported 67 families in financing solar home systems through a Community Solar Fund. This model encouraged cooperation and accountability by organising clients into teams, while aiming to make clean energy more affordable and sustainable. Ultimately, the vision was for the City of Cape Town to adopt a similar subsidy approach to Stellenbosch, ensuring that solar energy could reach even the most marginalized households.
The iShack operating model is underpinned by a long-term commitment to client-service, rather than a once-off, ‘drop-and-go’ intervention. The operations team includes groups of ‘iShack Agents’ who all live in the communities where they work.
Impact and potential
The primary mission of the project is to demonstrate, at scale, a viable and financially sustainable public-private model for the provision of incremental energy services to under-serviced communities.
The iShack model is consistent with numerous existing laws and policies in South Africa that prioritise the delivery of subsidised basic services to the poorest members of society.
The South African Constitution envisages ‘progressive realisation’ of services, and the iShack service is a working embodiment of that vision which can be adopted by municipalities throughout the country in order that they deliver on their statutory obligations to ensure universal access to basic energy.
With this interim service, an informal settlement resident who might otherwise have waited a decade or more before getting grid electricity, can take a significant step away from the use of dangerous, expensive and polluting fuels for lighting, and start enjoying a home-life that is safer, healthier, more dignified, more convenient, and economically and socially more enabling.
The iShack Project is a project of SIIL: The Sustainability Institute Innovation Lab (Pty) Ltd. SIIL was founded in 2012 as a spin-out of the Sustainability Institute, but is now independent of the Institute. The iShack office is based at the Sustainability Institute.
Today iShack is working towards replicating this model within many more municipalities.