Every South African NGO, union or foundation either has invested or endowed funds or receives funding from donors that have invested funds. Which means that every single SA NGO and foundation can greatly multiply its impact by ensuring that its funds are responsibly invested, or by asking its funders to re-examine their own investments.
The most fundamental infrastructure for any economy is a stable climate, clean air, clean water, and healthy well-fed, well-educated people in safe communities. But many of the industries and companies that are supposedly the backbone of our economy systematically undermine this basic infrastructure.
It’s no coincidence that the concept of ethical investment is practically unknown in South Africa. But it shouldn’t be — the global disinvestment campaign against companies doing business in apartheid South Africa helped dislodge our racist former government. Divestment is a rapidly growing global movement to move capital out of the unstable, extractive, fossil-fuel economy that threatens us with climate breakdown into the regenerative economy: A potential new era of social and economic stability based on wind and solar energy, a circular economy, sustainable agriculture and large-scale ecological restoration.