Dear South Africa,

You have invented more of the instruments in this series than any other nation. In March 2022 the World Bank issued a $150 million Wildlife Conservation Bond for you, the first of its kind: investors receive no coupon, and are paid at maturity only if the black rhino population grows in Addo Elephant National Park and the Great Fish River Nature Reserve. In 2021 you agreed the first Just Energy Transition Partnership, with an initial $8.5 billion from France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union.

The finance is substantial. The World Bank has lent $1 billion for a sustainable, low-carbon energy transition and $497 million for a just energy transition at Eskom, including the repurposing of a coal plant. Your investment plan for the transition identifies $98 billion of needs over five years.

The work ahead is plain, and it is worth saying plainly. At the last count, in 2021, eighty-two in every hundred of your children reached the end of primary school unable to read a simple text. Sixty in every hundred of you lived below $8.30 a day at the last count, in 2022. Only sixty-eight in every hundred of you drink safely managed water at home. Reading sets your Coverage today, at 18 out of 100, with income and water close behind. Each of them is within your reach.

The rhino bond shows that an outcome can be priced, verified and paid. The same design can carry a decent life for every citizen: an investor paid when a household is connected to clean power, when a worker leaves coal for a new job, when a child reads at grade level.

Now imagine that same resolve turned toward every home in the country. Picture Perfect South Africa: a morning when every family cooks with clean fuel and sits down to a full table; when every tap runs clean and every home has a safe toilet; when every child walks to a school where a teacher is waiting, and reads with ease by the age of ten; when every mother lives within reach of a clinic with the lights on, and every young person finds work that pays. And no South African falls below a decent life, because the nation has decided that none will.

“You priced a rhino. Now price a decent life with the same precision.”

So this is an invitation. Bring your vision, your story and your solutions to the Perfect South Africa Design Studio, and join the Co-designers who are already imagining what comes next. Perfect South Africa will not be designed for you. It will be designed by you.