Trainings on smart cities for African city leaders

UN-Habitat and the The African smart cities network ASToN held a two-days training on people-centered smart cities for 25 city leaders representing ten African local governments.

The ASToN is a network of eleven African cities whose goal is to develop their digital skills in order to become more inclusive and sustainable. Running between 2019 and 2022, the network includes the cities of Bamako (Mali), Benguerir (Morocco), Bizerte (Tunisia), Kampala (Uganda), Kigali (Rwanda), Kumasi (Ghana), Matola (Mozambique), Niamey (Niger), Lagos (Nigeria), Nouakchott (Mauritania) and Sèmè Podji (Benin). They’ve been collaborating and working together to find solutions for their local challenges and share a common will to expand their knowledge and experiences regarding digital transformation of their local governments.

“Nowadays, we’re facing difficulties towards the application of our policies regarding our digital transformation. The accurate levels of governances needs to be well-identified in order to implement better policies on the local-level, which will also help reduce citizens’ lack of confidence towards privacy and data surveillance” stated the city representative of Bamako during the second day of the training.

The training focused on providing both high-level information and pragmatic guidance for city executives and elected representatives to implement the actions recommended in UN-Habitat’s guidance on people-centered smart cities for local and regional governments. This is part of UN-Habitat’s People-Centered Smart Cities Flagship Programme, which works to ensure that deployment of technology contributes to sustainability, inclusivity, prosperity and human rights in cities. 

In 2022, UN-Habitat published a series of six playbooks to empower local governments to take a multi-stakeholder approach to digital transformation that realizes sustainability, inclusivity, prosperity and human rights for the benefit of all. Each of the five pillars of people-centered smart cities - Community, Capacity, Infrastructure, Security and Digital Equity - are elaborated in more detail in playbooks that outline step-by-step processes that cities can take in their journey to become people-centered smart cities, including policy-making, community engagement, procurement and finance.

In the training, the five pillars of the people-entered smart cities were presented to the participants, with an emphasis on digital public infrastructure, security and digital equity, as ASToN Network’s cities wanted to particularly increase their knowledge on these topics. The training also included a presentation of smart cities’ history and current context and more globally an introduction to different topics related to cities’ digital transformation. 

A part of the training course was dedicated to reflections towards the different pillars and for cities’ representatives to be able to share their different experiences and skills. Various stakeholders then expressed their wishes to cooperate more in the future. According to participants’ testimonies, many cities wish to implement a more people-centered approach to smart cities and strengthen their capacity in terms of digital transformation but face financial and organizational challenges.