The launch of the Pilot Biogas and Water Reuse Project in Buffalo City is a step in the right direction.
It signals a municipality that is beginning to think more deliberately about the future, about sustainability, and about how to respond to the growing pressures on energy, water, and infrastructure.
At a time where load-shedding, water shortages, and ageing systems continue to affect communities and businesses alike, initiatives like this matter. They show intent. They show movement. And they show a willingness to explore new solutions.
Uncomfortable question
But beneath the optimism lies an uncomfortable and necessary question.
Who owns this innovation? Partnerships with international governments, like Germany in this case, bring valuable expertise, funding, and global best practice. That cannot be ignored.
There is real value in learning from countries that have already made progress in areas such as waste-to-energy and water reuse.
However, sustainability is not only about technology. It is about ecosystems.
It is about whether solutions can take root locally, adapt over time, and continue delivering value long after the initial partners have stepped away.
And this is where the gap becomes difficult to ignore.
Across Buffalo City and the broader Eastern Cape, there are local entrepreneurs already working on recycling, water purification, waste collection, and alternative energy solutions.
Many of them operate at small scale, often with limited resources, but with a deep understanding of the communities they serve.
They are already solving problems, just without the same level of visibility or support. Yet when projects of this scale are introduced, these local players are rarely positioned as partners.
At best, they are spectators. At worst, they are completely excluded from the value chain.
Beneath the surface
A truly integrated approach to waste, water, and energy should not only connect systems. It should connect people.
It should ask difficult but important questions. Where are the local SMMEs in this project? Who is being prepared to maintain and operate this infrastructure in the long term?
How is this initiative contributing to the growth of a local green economy that can outlive the pilot phase? Because without deliberate inclusion, the risk is clear.
The infrastructure may work, but the ecosystem will not. Imagine a different approach.
Alongside the German partnership, the metro could have issued an open expression of interest to local businesses, innovators, and cooperatives. Not as an add-on, but as a core part of the project design.
A structured panel of local SMMEs contributing to implementation. Entrepreneurs involved in operations, maintenance, and data monitoring. Small businesses supported to innovate on top of the infrastructure being introduced.
This is how you move from a project to an ecosystem. South Africa already speaks strongly about localisation, inclusive growth, and the role of small businesses in economic development.
At the centre of a ripple
But these principles must move beyond policy documents and into the design of real projects.
Municipalities, in particular, sit at the centre of this opportunity. They are not only service providers.
They are economic enablers. By opening up projects like this to local participation, Buffalo City could begin to build a pipeline of skills, businesses, and innovations that strengthen the metro from within.
It would ensure that knowledge is not only transferred, but embedded. That economic value is not only created, but shared. Because the real test of this pilot is not whether it works on paper or during its initial phase.
The real test is what happens five years from now. Will the metro still rely on external expertise to maintain and expand it? Or will there be a network of capable local businesses that have grown alongside it and are ready to take it forward?
This is not a rejection of global collaboration. It is a call to deepen it.
Buffalo City has an opportunity to lead, not only in adopting sustainable technologies, but in redefining how public sector innovation is done.
International partnerships and local entrepreneurship need not be separate conversations, when a single, intentional strategy is a feasible, win-win path to take.
Because in the end, sustainability is not only about cleaner energy or reused water.
It is about building local economies that are capable of sustaining those systems. And that begins with ownership.
- Buzani is a business consultant and youth empowerment advocate, as well as a founding member of an award-winning SME in Mdantsane
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