Turning sustainability talk into action requires practical measurement. Volkswagen Financial Services South Africa CIO Wilma Crosson, PetroSA acting CIO Zanele Hala, Cassava Technologies South Africa and Botswana CEO Ziaad Suleman and Wits School of Business Sciences IS professor Rennie Naidoo explore how maturity models help African organisations execute their Green IT strategies.
Africa's digital economy is growing fast and that makes sustainability planning urgent. Data centres are multiplying, enterprise cloud adoption is accelerating and in countries like South Africa, where grid instability has forced organisations to run diesel generators for years, the carbon cost of connectivity shows up directly in the fuel bill.
At the same time, global ESG reporting standards are tightening. The International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) is reshaping disclosure expectations for any organisation seeking international capital. Scope 2 electricity emissions were once a niche accounting concern. They are now a boardroom metric. For technology leaders, the question is no longer whether to engage with sustainability, but how to demonstrate that engagement with credible data.
Globally developed maturity frameworks were not designed with African operating conditions in mind and that gap matters in practice.
Although there has been a marked improvement in electricity reliability, loadshedding forced organisations to run backup generators for extended periods, affecting the emissions profile of IT operations in ways that diverge sharply from what standard benchmarks assume. A Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) score that looks reasonable on paper may have concealed significant diesel consumption that never appears in a facility efficiency metric. Resilience planning and backup fuel intensity need to be incorporated into any maturity assessment applied on this continent.
Grid carbon intensity varies significantly across the continent, making emissions comparisons unreliable without transparent disclosure of underlying assumptions. In many organisations, the first stage of maturity is simply installing meters and establishing governance controls for sustainability data.
Real opportunity
IS professor and research director at the Wits School of Business Sciences, Rennie Naidoo, confirms that this gap is structural rather than exceptional. “In African contexts, resilience and measurement capability are foundational dimensions of sustainability maturity rather than advanced enhancements,” he says.
However, the leapfrog opportunity is real. Mobile-first infrastructure, software-defined architectures and cloud adoption at scale allow African organisations to bypass the legacy data centre footprint that more mature markets are still paying to decommission.
An organisation building its IT infrastructure today can make renewable energy commitments and efficiency standards a procurement requirement from the beginning, rather than retrofitting them onto decades-old estates.
A maturity model properly calibrated for this continent needs to account for both the constraints and the shortcuts – penalising an organisation for the diesel it burns during loadshedding while ignoring the legacy debt it never accumulated produces a distorted picture.
Measurement before strategy
At Volkswagen Financial Services South Africa (VWFS), CIO Wilma Crosson described a shift triggered by three converging pressures: the organisation’s Mobility 2030 strategic programme, which formally positioned CO2 reduction as a core business objective; increasing reporting requirements around carbon footprint measurement; and structured internal Green IT measurement. That last factor, she argued, changed the quality of the conversation.
“Green IT discussions shifted naturally into executive and board forums, focusing not only on compliance but on how IT can actively enable sustainable growth while reducing long-term cost and risk,” Wilma says.
A Green IT maturity model is the tool that makes this shift possible. It is a structured way for a CIO to answer a precise question: where are we now and what does good actually look like from here? Without that anchor, sustainability commitments remain aspirational language rather than measurable commitments with owners and deadlines.
For Zanele Hala, acting CIO at PetroSA, the gap between intention and execution is primarily a resourcing problem. “It is not just a conversation with other stakeholders. It is actually procuring and implementing it. If you do not have the resources to source those specific services, it is going to take you longer,” she explains.
This is a reality most African CIOs recognise. Capital allocation cycles in large organisations rarely move at the pace sustainability ambitions demand and Green IT investments often compete with operational resilience priorities for the same constrained budget. Measurement, in other words, is not just a technical step, it is a budget negotiation tool.
Sustainability as engineering discipline
Wilma described where Green IT matures beyond compliance directly. At VWFS SA, IT investment decisions are now evaluated through a sustainability lens alongside security, resilience, cost and user experience. Architecture choices favour consolidation and reduced data centre dependency while vendor selection incorporates sustainability credentials. The company is also modernising end-user technology towards lower power consumption and longer usable life.
“Sustainability is treated as a design principle, not an afterthought. Many greener choices also result in simpler architectures, lower operating costs and improved user experience,” Wilma says.
Ziaad Suleman, CEO of Cassava Technologies South Africa and Botswana, frames maturity in terms of infrastructure investment. Cassava’s subsidiary Africa Data Centres has installed approximately 815 kW of solar capacity across South African facilities and has signed a 20 MW solar power purchase agreement to supply renewable energy to key facilities. The company has also implemented infrastructure optimisation tools that allow operators to monitor energy consumption and efficiency across facilities in real time.
For Ziaad, the next frontier is autonomous systems. Over the next three to five years, the distinguishing capability for mature green IT organisations will be agentic AI applied to energy management: real-time optimisation of renewable energy systems, autonomous demand management and predictive maintenance for solar, wind and smart grid infrastructure.
“The key factor that will distinguish leaders in this area will be the use of AI systems to run and operate power consumption and distribution management systems. These intelligent agents can also autonomously operate demand-side efforts such as intelligent building management systems,” Ziaad explains.
Zanele’s organisation operates within tighter constraints but applies the same logic within them. Sustainability metrics are embedded in PetroSA’s performance management framework, cascaded to individual divisions including IT. The organisation measures what it can, executes where capability allows and engages suppliers who are themselves pursuing sustainable strategies.
A practical playbook
Rennie says that CIOs can draw on several frameworks without starting from scratch. The Sustainable ICT Capability Maturity Framework from the Innovation Value Institute treats sustainability as a structured management discipline across five domains: governance, lifecycle accountability, performance management, stakeholder engagement and cultural adoption. It is designed to be applied progressively, making it well-suited to organisations at the instrumentation stage as well as those further along.
The Green Grid’s Data Centre Maturity Model provides benchmarking logic specifically for infrastructure sustainability across power, cooling and compute efficiency and is particularly useful for organisations with owned or co-located data centre assets. CIOs who align internal reporting to these frameworks like ISSB standards early reduce the compliance burden when regulatory mandates arrive.
Rennie cautions against methodological errors that undermine credibility before a programme gets traction. Inconsistent boundary setting between reporting periods, over-reliance on single efficiency metrics like PUE and perception-driven maturity scoring not validated against metered data all produce false confidence. Effective benchmarking requires consistent boundary documentation, dual-method transparency for electricity emissions reporting and integrated accountability across IT, facilities and finance.
For most African organisations, the starting point is not framework selection. It is instrumentation. Wilma’s own journey illustrates this: structured internal measurement preceded board-level engagement. Ziaad’s advice to CIOs follows the same sequence: establish a clear baseline for energy use and emissions first, identify optimisation opportunities and then consider where workloads are hosted.
Quick wins for CIOs starting out
- Consolidate infrastructure and reduce data centre dependency
- Modernise end-user devices to lower-power, longer-life equipment
- Enable flexible working to reduce physical footprint and travel emissions
- Include sustainability criteria in vendor and procurement evaluation
- Install energy monitoring and establish a carbon baseline before setting targets
Long-term strategic priorities
- Transition to cloud and co-location providers with renewable energy commitments
- Pursue renewable energy procurement for owned facilities
- Integrate Scope 3 supplier emissions into procurement governance
- Deploy AI-driven energy management for real-time infrastructure optimisation
- Align reporting with ISSB sustainability standards ahead of regulatory mandates
From intent to action
Zanele’s contribution is a reminder that intent and execution are different problems. The conversation must happen at every level and be backed by measurable KPIs and the budget to act. Without that, sustainability remains an aspiration that gets deferred when the next operational crisis arrives.
Ziaad frames the horizon furthest out. The organisations that lead in Green IT over the next decade will be those that treat sustainability as an engineering and operational discipline embedded into the infrastructure lifecycle. The measurement baseline, the renewable energy investments, the efficient cooling systems: these are not preparatory steps. They are the infrastructure of a digital economy that can afford to keep growing.
Wilma’s advice to peers early in their Green IT journey is direct: do not wait for perfection. “Green IT doesn’t begin with complex frameworks or flawless data, it starts with intentional, practical decisions that are often small changes. Many of our early sustainability gains came from consolidating infrastructure, modernising end‑user technology and enabling more flexible ways of working,” she concludes.
