During the last semester of his Master’s program at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Ralph Black Ferguson (South Africa, Waterford Kamhlaba UWCSA 2004-2010) and other two fellow students worked on a project that explored how to engage businesses on île d’Oléron, an island off the coast of France, in the transition to sustainable energy. The island has the goal of using 100% sustainable energy by the year 2050, and the project aimed at understanding the strategic areas that could be focused on in order to help achieve this goal. The project was done in collaboration with the local government on the island, and the results of the study are now to be translated into French and sent to the local governments of the region that are working with sustainable energy.

Ralph told us that his experience at Waterford had a strong impact on his decision to study sustainable development, and influenced the fact that he chose to study Master’s in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability – a program that valued both social and environmental sustainability highly. “UWC is an extremely important movement given the current state of our world. It becomes clear when working with difficult questions in larger groups of people, especially in an international context, how important the values that UWC embodies are.” Ralph will continue to work on sustainability and aims to join an organisation that focuses especially on sustainable development projects in Southern or East Africa.