NAIROBI – Kenya government on Wednesday announced it will invest heavily in information communication technology (ICT) to make its capital city Nairobi more efficient in order to improve its attractiveness to investors.
The Permanent Secretary in the Ministry for Information and Communications Bitange Ndemo said use of smart technology will help the authorities plan for better traffic, alert when water is leaking from pipes or electricity is being stolen among other uses.
Nairobi generates 56 percent of the gross domestic product according to the government statistics, making it the most important economic hub of the country. The government has started the city’s improvement with expansion of roads with the assistance of the Chinese government and has now embarked on improvement of the city’s electricity transmission network.
“We want to create efficiencies and make it easier to do business in this city,” Ndemo said in Nairobi during the launch of a white paper report titled “A Vision of a Smarter City: How Nairobi Can Lead the Way into a Prosperous and Sustainable Future. ” The report draws on the views of leaders and experts from the public and private sectors, World Bank, UN-HABITAT and civil society organizations on issues like transportation, energy and public safety.
The launch came in the background of the completion of the national transport policy known as the Sessional Paper 1 of 2012 on the National Integrated Transport system that is expected to be approved by parliament in the second quarter of this year. “The policy that will help us improve Nairobi transport system in line with the smart city concept is ready awaiting parliamentary approval,” said Cyrus Njiru, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry for Transport.
Among the issues to be implemented include ensuring the city is served with high capacity vehicles and utilizing technology to enforce road traffic discipline. “We have been approached by several investors who say if we can provide that type of infrastructure, they are ready to finance Kenyans to acquire higher capacity transport vehicles,” said Njiru.
The white paper that was launched on Wednesday is based on a roundtable discussion which took place late 2011 and outlines how Nairobi should turn to the latest technologies and global best practices to transform itself into a ‘smarter’ and more efficient city as it strives to cope with an expanding population and become a major African business hub.
“With increased urbanization and substantial economic opportunities, major African cities like Nairobi are coming under more pressure than ever to transform,” said Tony Mwai, Country General Manager, IBM East Africa, which partnered with the government to develop the while paper.
“For Nairobi to reach its full potential as a regional powerhouse, new technologies and approaches are required to modernise the city’s systems and to make it a better place to live, work and do business.” The improvement is also meant to ensure that the city is ready to host its growing population. Currently, Nairobi is home to just over 3 million inhabitants, expected to soar to over five million by 2020 as migration to urban areas continues. According to IBM’s Commuter Pain Survey, Nairobi is the fourth most painful commute in the world.
According to city officials, traffic jams cost the economy over 600,000 U.S. dollars a day in lost productivity, fuel consumption and pollution. “Nairobi needs new transport alternatives urgently. It is increasingly obvious that Nairobi must move beyond the traditional model of just building roads to solve traffic problems. It needs a combination of physical infrastructure, new ways of thinking and new technologies,” said Andre Dzikus of the Urban Mobility Unit at the UN-HABITAT.
The white paper lists a number of possible technological solutions to consider including micro chips embedded in driving licenses to record a driver’s road history, priced road usage schemes and using mobile phone signal density to pinpoint and predict traffic jams. The white paper highlights the development of alternative energy sources, smart metering and incentive schemes to change energy consumption as possible solutions to Nairobi’s energy problems.
The white paper underlines the need for modern analytics technologies to help understand and respond to the vast amounts of relevant information that is generated by CCTV to check on crime. It also calls for better collaboration between public and private sectors as well as more integration between government departments. It suggests that shared emergency resources between public and private sectors and centralised information systems could improve Nairobi’s ability to deal with major city incidents such as last year’s fuel explosion and fire in the impoverished Sinai district of the city in which more than 100 people were killed. (Xinhua)
