Drakenstein Municipality in the Western Cape has won a Sustainability Impact Award for Schneider Electric’s Anglophone Africa region, shining the spotlight on its unwavering commitment to sustainable leadership and its forward-thinking approach to ensuring a sustainable future for its coming generations. Schneider Electric was recently named the World’s Most Sustainable Corporation 2025 by Corporate Knights and is the only company to rank first in the Global 100, twice.
Mr. Seraj Johaar is the Executive Director of Corporate & Planning Services at Drakenstein Municipality.
“Being acknowledged in this way by a world leader in this regard is indeed a feather in our cap and a recognition of Drakenstein’s own dedicated sustainability journey and role in the quest for Net Zero. It paves the way for us to form further partnerships in this space,” said councillor Stephen Korabie, executive mayor of Drakenstein Municipality. “Municipalities and the communities we serve are directly affected by sustainability issues. Similarly, municipalities are in a unique and powerful frontline position to promote sustainable solutions through our policies, operations, infrastructure design and resources management. As a traditional agricultural community, sustainability is in Drakenstein’s DNA. We believe in following a responsible and forward-looking approach to ensure a protected environment and sustainable tomorrow for our next generations,” said the executive mayor.
Drakenstein Municipality in Paarl received the Sustainability Impact Award for commendable efforts made to achieve its decarbonisation goals in 2024. These include starting to replace its existing 11kV oil electricity distribution infrastructure and adopting Schneider Electric’s more modern, digitised and green RM AirSeT air-powered ring main unit, reducing the municipality’s carbon footprint by using pure air instead of SF6 gas. The municipality further invested in a Schneider Electric scada system to monitor its distribution network for simulating and modelling electrical circuits, trend analysis, futuristic system warnings, and pinpointing coordination-related disruptions and outages to perform detailed studies.
Canninah Dladla, cluster president for Anglophone Africa at Schneider Electric said: “I extend my heartfelt congratulations to Drakenstein Municipality for its remarkable achievement in translating sustainability ambition into tangible action. Their success reinforces the importance of collaboration in reaching Net Zero.”
The Schneider Electric Sustainability Impact Awards were launched in 2022 to celebrate and recognise the pivotal role that the company’s extensive network of partners play in delivering a more resilient and sustainable electric world. Now in its second year, participants are carefully assessed on how they are leveraging energy and digital and automation solutions in their operations in order to reduce energy usage, increase operational efficiency and embrace circularity across the value chain. For this round, Schneider Electric received an impressive 453 applications.
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