Our languages already carry energy knowledge.
African languages can carry this debate. Our task is to build on that knowledge, not replace it.
Flagship programme · In development
Language is infrastructure.
CLICK (Climate Language Integration & Community Knowledge) will co-create climate and energy vocabulary in African languages with communities, linguists and energy experts, then put that vocabulary to work where decisions are made. Language must be planned, built and maintained.
The problem
South Africa’s just transition is being shaped through formal processes that invite communities to participate. But in these invited spaces, the agenda, the language and the rules are set in advance. Communities arrive after the key questions have already been framed, and they are asked to respond in English to long documents within short comment periods.
Research in Mpumalanga’s coal-dependent communities shows that people experience the transition as unclear, top-down and insufficiently transparent. Women, informal workers and other marginalised groups are the most excluded. This is not only an information gap. It is a gap in the spaces where communities can develop and exercise agency.
CLICK builds those spaces. They do not replace formal consultation. They strengthen communities’ ability to enter it with their own language, evidence and proposals.
Theory of change
If we co-create climate and energy vocabulary in African languages with communities, linguists and energy experts, and put that vocabulary to work through dialogues, games, radio and policy talking points, then affected communities will be able to understand, debate and contest energy decisions in their own languages.
Who CLICK is for
Adults in mining-affected communities whose first language is an African language, with particular attention to community leaders, educators, community radio presenters and the young people who translate official information for their families. They are the most affected by transition decisions, the most excluded from them, and the messengers other people trust.
What we believe
Language is infrastructure.
Like the grid, vocabulary has to be planned, built, maintained and owned. A validated terminology is public infrastructure the state should invest in and use.
In our words, on our terms.
Umntu ngumntu ngabantu. A transition that is not understood by the people living it is not just, however well it is financed.
The five workstreams
Term bank and glossary
Lexicographers, speakers and energy experts agree usable climate and energy terms, test them in community settings, publish them openly and submit them to PanSALB.
Imbizo: community dialogues
A standing community of practice in which people meet the new vocabulary in context and connect it to their own experience of electricity, coal, water and heat stress.
Games for energy justice
Vernacular play sessions of Stimela Transitions, and the development of Lathitha!, a game about building a harmonised grid while negotiating justice and trade-offs.
Evergreen talking points
Short explainers in African languages on recurring decisions, including IRP updates, tariff applications, coal and gas decisions and just transition finance.
Community radio and creative media
Radio segments, poetry and idiom that carry CLICK vocabulary into everyday speech, so it outlives any single workshop.
A duty, not a courtesy
Section 6 of the Constitution obliges the state to take practical and positive measures to elevate the status and advance the use of indigenous languages. The Use of Official Languages Act of 2012 requires national departments and public entities to adopt language policies. The Constitutional Court confirmed in Doctors for Life (2006) that meaningful public involvement is an enforceable duty. And the Climate Change Act of 2024 opens a new cycle of consultations, including on sector emission targets and provincial and municipal climate response plans.
CLICK offers the state a ready-made way to meet these obligations.