A few days after announcing that they were setting up an innovation centre in Nairobi, International Business Machines (IBM) is now pitching for a government job to transform Nairobi into a smart city. The company has drawn a white paper titled-A Vision of a smarter City, discussing the possibility of turning Nairobi into a city whose functionalities are pegged on modern day technology.
The concept sets to integrate the different aspects of the city for example; traffic control, emergency response, water provision as well as garbage collection, all to run from one central command centre.
Traffic jams which cost the country an estimated Sh50 million everyday are the lead woes for residents commuting in and out of the city. According to a surely carried out by IBM last year, Nairobi was ranked fourth most painful cities to commute in the world. Adding to the woes is frequent water shortages, non-existant garbage disposal mechanisms, frequent power outages and lack of access roads to residential areas for emergency response.
The Information and Communication PS, Bitange Ndemo acknowledges that city looses billions of shillings annually to inefficiency.”Adoption of technology is essential for the city to handle these challenges and grow”, he said.
The white paper is however under negotiations with the government and no conclusions have been made yet.”From the discussions, we see a tremendous interest in IBM’s Smarter Cities vision”, said Tony Mwai who was appointed to head the new nerve centre for Kenya and East Africa. Tony Mwai had been working in the company’s head office in USA for the last 25 years.
IBM has been operating in Africa for nearly six decades and has invested more than $US120 million in the last two years as part of its strategy to focus on the world’s growth markets.
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