Smart African Cities
By: Ben Roberts
Tags: Smart Cities, Internet of Things, Agritech, Africa, Nairobi

What is Liquid Intelligent Technologies doing to help make Nairobi a smart city?

Nairobi is a city with a number of challenges, with perhaps traffic queues being the most obvious to visitors and residents alike. Large strides towards making Nairobi a smart city have been made in recent years with installation by the Government of an extensive network of CCTV cameras and smart traffic lights in certain areas.

Liquid Intelligent Technologies began by building and operating a robust smart city infrastructure for Nairobi. This comprises a city-wide fibre optic metro backbone, which connects all major buildings and office parks, and serves to connect many communications towers. This further enables multiple MNOs to offer 100% 4G and emerging 5G coverage in the city, along with ISPs that provide affordable uncapped data using fibre to the home and Wi-Fi last mile technologies.

Our data centre in Nairobi is the largest in the region and is enabling the local businesses and start-ups to interconnect with local and global cloud systems to innovate their digital services. This opens up the use of Artificial Intelligence and Data science, to make the Internet of Things (IoT) come to life with actionable decision making.

Liquid also has rolled out a country wide dedicated IoT network using Sigfox IoT technology. With 90% national coverage and 100% coverage in Nairobi, and combined with the other digital infrastructure, this enables an opportunity for unprecedented innovation at speed to transform a city like Nairobi, retro fitting technology onto existing services.

This has inspired some smart city innovation projects in Nairobi by NGOs and humanitarian organisations to incubate local solutions to local problems. These have included initiatives for air quality measurement and monitoring the availability of communal pit latrines.

Air pollution is a particular problem in Kenya with the WHO stating that it is ​the fifth largest cause of deaths and disability across the country. ​This pollution is caused by substantial increases in traffic levels, construction of high-rise buildings and new industrial activities releasing fine particulate matter into the air. Poor refuse removal services result in citizens burning plastic and other garbage on roadsides which is also a major contributor. Code for Africa have partnered with Liquid to roll out air quality monitoring across Nairobi. The sensors provide detailed neighbourhood measurements of airborne pollutants every 2 ½ minutes. This information is freely available to anyone via a simple dashboard.

It was well known that pollution is bad, but before this project was introduced, there was no localised evidence about exactly how bad, or where the hotspots are. The data collected has been a subject of interest for environmental authorities, documentary filmmakers as well as local communities to spur a call to action.

In 2019, the UN Habitat General assembly took place in Nairobi, and Liquid supported the UN-Habitat Internet of Things (IoT) for Sustainable Development Makerthon competition on addressing urban challenges. And in the same year, Liquid partnered with African data science challenge platform Zindi and ride hailing company Uber, to task African data scientists to develop algorithms to predict traffic problems using data collected from commuter passenger vehicles.

What was the attraction to that city?

Nairobi is the HQ for our East African operations and we have very close working relationships with the Government and Municipal authorities, and the opportunity to task the booming Nairobi innovation community to come up with solutions to be showcased to decision makers has been the driver.

Nairobi, consistently ranked as one of the fastest growing and most innovative cities in the world, is a perfect test bed to use African technology skills to deploy new technology to affirm Liquid Intelligent Technologies’ commitment to UN Sustainable Development Goal number 11.

How does it compare to other smart cities across Africa?

Kigali in Rwanda stands out as one of the cleanest and well-run capital cities in the region. And this is by no coincidence, as it has institutionalised an agenda of urban planning and zoning with the aim to become a smart city at the heart of this.

Nairobi itself lacks a smart city plan but has been progressing with all the elements of a smart city organically coming together. The purpose and mission of such a master plan could be a road map to coordinate the smart city activities of Central and County Governments, Private Sector Companies, along with NGOs and civil society.

Completely new cities in Africa like Tatu City and Konza Technopolis, both in Kenya, are being constructed from the ground up as tech enabled smart cities from day one with an aim to be the pinnacle of ultra modern living in Africa.

Is the definition of a smart city in Africa different to the rest of the world?

Cities in the world fall into three categories:

· Very old and have evolved and expanded over centuries for example, Rome.

· A new and planned city such as Milton Keynes in United Kingdom, where I grew up, which was built from scratch and where everything has been planned and implemented to a blueprint.

· Cities/towns/even villages that have grown very fast such as Nairobi (now the place I call home) whose census results show the city has moved from a population of 2.2 million in 2000 to almost 5 million today. In Africa however, Nairobi is dwarfed by the mega cities of Kinshasa and Lagos with populations of almost 15 million.

The arrival of millions of urban-dwellers has created problems for unplanned cities around the world both in terms of infrastructure and capacity.

African cities have an advantage over many older overseas cities for a number of reasons:

1. A lack of legacy infrastructure and systems means that African cities can start with the latest technology available. We have seen this in particular in telecoms where countries leapt to 3G, 4G and 5G rather than invest in fixed networks.

2. A young population combined with an entrepreneurial zeal

Our young people have the same aspirations as their foreign counterparts — to have fulfilling and well-paid employment, good housing, healthcare, education, access to the digital economy.

School Students at Nakuru Girls High School, learning about and exploring curiosities with Internet of Things to solve problems in their communities

However, Africa’s key ingredient is it’s ‘Can Do’ attitude and the ability of its people to innovate and create home-grown solutions to the continent’s problems.

3. Problems that affect the entire population of a city. No matter how rich or poor you are in Nairobi, poor air quality affects us all which focuses the attention of the Government and civil society.

However, this concept of the ‘smart city’, where technology and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications are leveraged to measurably improve the quality of life and efficiency of communities, can only succeed if connectivity is reliable, affordable and effective.

If one describes the 4IR as the ‘heart’ of the modern world, then connectivity would best be likened to the world’s nervous system. And just like the nervous system, if it is shut down, the heart fails. On the other hand, when it is strong and reliable, connectivity can open up unprecedented new possibilities.

This is why Liquid Telecom has spent the last decade building our fibre network which stretches 100,000km from Cape Town to Cairo, and East to West from Mombasa to Kinshasa. It provides the basis for Africa’s economic future.

It’s been said that smart cities can only make sense if put in the broader picture of giving every African citizen the right to basic services. Is that a fair comment?

Using technology and data-driven systems to solve real-life problems is both pragmatic and cost-effective in the long-term.

Many African economies are driven by Agriculture and Kenya is no exception. Outside of the large cities we are seeing smart technology being used in many ways to improve services. In the agricultural sector, Liquid is looking at ways that tech can enable precision farming in agriculture and in aquaculture.

Using the Sigfox 0G network, we have enabled a successful precision farming deployment, now in its 3rd year of operation, in partnership with Twiga Foods at their Takuwa Farm, just outside Nairobi. The results have been an increase in yield of crops such as onions, as well as decrease in input costs, and the project recently won an IoT technology award at the East Africacom conference.

In the extreme western side of Kenya, Liquid has deployed sensors in Lake Victoria to help grow the yields of Tilapia fish farmers.

Smart Sensors in Tilapia Ponds Near Kisumu in Western Kenya.

It is certainly my dream that the enablement of Agri-Tech will not only make a noticeable impact on the GDP of African countries but will also offer a bright future to the tech savvy youth who are born in rural areas to remain in their communities implementing technology for rural income generation, instead of heading to the cities in search of jobs.

Sections of this article have been included in an article by Northern African Wireless Communications Magazine https://www.africanwirelesscomms.com/Media/Default/archive/nawc/NAWC2105.pdf

Photography by Gerald Njoroge and Marcellous Palla