A clean street in Kigali, Rwanda. Photo: CRYIL NDEGEYA
Participants at the Transform Africa technology
conference in Kigali, Rwanda, last week glimpsed into the future of
smart cities.
Some did it in the conference
exhibition hall where blue-chip companies, from Microsoft to Samsung,
laid on displays of gizmos and cutting-edge technologies.
Nearby,
young geeks eagerly showed off apps and clever websites, hoping to
become the Next Big Thing in the world of technology.
Others
did it in the streets of Kigali itself where the government, working in
partnership with a private Korean firm, has rolled out public Wi-Fi and
is rolling out ultra-fast 4G LTE Internet access.
Kenya
has long shown its ability to pioneer technologies. The Ushahidi
platform showed us the power of crowd-sourcing and clever coding; M-Pesa
has dialed up a revolution in banking in the world of mobile telephony;
iHub is buzzing with ideas and clever people; while the Kenya Open Data
initiative dared us to dream about an open, transparent, and
accountable world.
Yet for all our claims to being the
Silicon Savannah, we are simply not doing enough to apply technology to
our everyday lives and make our cities – and lives – smarter. Kigali
offers some glimpses into where we should be headed.
Rwandan
citizens who arrive at the airport do not have to queue up and wait to
have their passports stamped; they simply scan them at the e-Gates and
waltz through, saving time and money, and still saving a record of
comings and goings.
Want to register a business in
Rwanda? You can visit a one-stop centre and leave in a couple of hours
with a tax registration certificate, bank accounts, utility connections
and the necessary licenses. Or you can do it all online.
Such
reforms have turned Rwanda into one of the easiest places to start a
business, with the country ranking 32nd in the latest World Bank/IFC
Doing Business Report. Uganda, by comparison, is 100 places back.
Rwanda
has set itself an ambitious target to try and use technology to flatten
bureaucracy, the time and the cost of doing things. If you live in a
small, hilly country in the middle of Africa, you need to get things
done and fast.
Technology can cut through bureaucracy
with the precision and ferocity of a laser. But its impact on society is
usually only felt when it is applied to address pressing problems and
made available to the masses free or at relatively low cost.
In
smart cities, especially in the West, smart power grids, can monitor
demand and supply of electricity, moving it to areas where it is needed
most, such as during the evenings and early mornings in residential
areas to ensure availability and avoid blackouts.
Maybe
we are still many years and many billions of dollars away from such
heights, but there are pressing problems to which we can apply
relatively cheap technology.
Let’s take traffic. We
have some of the worst hold-ups, but we also have some of the smartest
geeks. Maybe there is already an app that gives you an instant sense of
where the worst traffic is and alternative routes to take, like car
navigation systems do elsewhere.
How about we start
with a few simpler things. Take, for instance, renewal of driving
permits and passports. If you own either document, your records probably
already exist in a database somewhere. Why not go online, prove your
identity, pay a small fee and have a new permit or passport printed out
and posted to you?
How about submitting building plans
for approval? These are complicated drawings done by important people
and must therefore be physically handed over and thumbed through by
equally important bureaucrats, right? Well, no! In many countries,
including South Africa and Rwanda, you
can submit your plans online and track their processing until they are approved and sent back to you.
can submit your plans online and track their processing until they are approved and sent back to you.
We
can go on and on, from using apps to tell us which bays are free in a
mall parking lot, to which doctors and dentists have shorter waiting
lines at their practices.
Cities in the region are
laying on ambitious infrastructure plans for railways, super-highways,
bypasses and rapid mass transit routes. Those investments are urgently
required.
However the smart cities of the future will
fuse hardware investments with the technology to get things done faster
and cheaply on the Internet and through the mobile phone. Kigali is a
small example of what can be a great revolution through East Africa’s
cities.
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