Partner with us
Zonke Energy works with communities and municipalities to deliver clean and affordable energy for residents of off-grid informal settlements. Our services and technology are bridging the gap between ambition and reality.
Around 1.5 million South African households live on land legally excluded from the grid — floodplains, servitudes, transit corridors. In the absence of a legal option, communities depend on dangerous izinyokayoka, paraffin, and informal re-sellers.
Each Zonke Solar Tower — typically 2 kWp — serves up to 16 households within a 30 m radius via low-voltage DC cabling. Clients pre-pay by phone. We monitor every connection from our cloud platform in real time.
We design, build, and operate the whole stack — generation hardware, payments, and remote monitoring — and then partner with the community to operate a micro-utility.
Generation and distribution hardware — the physical tower, panels, inverter and battery enclosure, sized for dense urban deployment.
Mobile-based prepaid payment collection. Clients top up by phone. Joining fee plus a monthly subscription priced by service tier.
Cloud management platform for monitoring every meter, balancing load on the tower, and supporting clients without sending a truck.
We invest in upskilling residents, enabling them to participate in the operation of our services.
Zonke is funded by international partners working at the intersection of energy access, climate, and African development. We partner with like-minded organisations working to advance clean and affordable energy for all South Africans.
Selected open-access papers co-authored with our academic partners at the University of Exeter and the African Climate & Development Initiative, drawing on the long-running research program in our deployment sites.
Insights from a 2020–23 research program in a Cape Town informal settlement that expands ‘sector coupling’ beyond its technical definition to integrate solar electricity with entrepreneurship, refrigeration, lighting and digital services — reframing energy provision as a foundation for multidimensional development in the informal city.
Read the SourceDrawing on the solar mini-grid project in Cape Town, three ways the disruptive aspects of solar energy help re-build knowledge on the informal city: re-positioning notions of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ infrastructure, opening new avenues for citizen autonomy, and recasting informality as a site for continuous innovation and learning.
Read the SourceFour areas for further elaboration in off-grid urban research: redefining the meaning of the ‘grid’ itself; decolonising and decentring global development standards; engaging critically with narratives of inadequacy applied to informal urban spaces; and moving toward a needs-based approach co-produced with local communities.
Read the SourceShort films, partner features, and footage from the field — the Zonke story in motion.
A short film produced by Innovate UK’s Energy Catalyst programme on Zonke’s work in Cape Town.