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The overall concept of a smart city may not be directly applicable to present day Africa, but the embedded technologies can help governments cope with urbanisation and other challenges, explains Mark Walker at IDC.

The smart city concept is increasingly becoming central to the prevailing public discourse around Africa’ s urban future. However, as with many technological buzzwords, one has to wonder whether this trend is relevant to African realities. Certainly, if a smart city is seen as the implementation of high-tech urban innovation exclusively modelled on examples from developed countries, the relevance is extremely low.

However, smart cities are not just about implementing technology for technology’ s sake, but rather follow an informed agenda to combat the relevant urban challenges, such as growing populations and issues relating to basic service delivery, education, healthcare, citizen safety, and social inclusion.

IDC sees smart city as a city-state, county, city, town, or other nonnational government organisation built on an ICT foundation layer that allows for efficient city management, economic development, sustainability, innovation, and citizen engagement. When addressing functional, economic, and social challenges, whether in brownfield or greenfield existing or new developments, smart cities can contribute to the oft-cited rise of Africa.

The IMF’ s Africa Economic Outlook of October 2015 acknowledges the impact that global macroeconomic factors have had on the decadelong growth outlook, but also rightly emphasises the fact that there is considerable country and regional variation across the continent.

Apart from the vagaries of global economic trends, there are a variety

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