How one project is cooling down thousands of homes

The residents of Groblershoop in the Northern Cape had no choice but to sleep outside at night. With the temperatures in their corrugated iron homes soaring as high as 42°C in the evenings, it was too hot to remain indoors. 

“It was bad during the day, too,” recalled Desmond Dube, the acting municipal manager of the !Kheis local municipality. “When you come home from work, you can’t go into the house immediately. You have to sit outside and wait for the house to cool off by opening the doors.”

Residents were using their homes as a “storage space”, said Denise Lundall, a project officer at the state-owned South African National Energy Development Institute (Sanedi), which is mandated to promote and advance energy efficiency. “That’s where they would lock up their possessions because they could not stay in that house … Imagine sleeping outside because inside your house is too hot.”