Smart City eReadiness Assessment – Is City of Windhoek Ready?

Abstract

African Smart Cities are challenged by main issues ranging from sustainable services, efficient services, lack of supporting policies and security issues. Most of those commonly visited cities such as Cape Town (South Africa), Windhoek (Namibia) are making efforts to improve service delivery. However, as the number of visitors and citizens increase, it makes it difficult for city fathers to plan and manage the pressure. Some African countries have done well in learning from advanced countries and benchmark with those cities e.g Barcelona, Malta. However, the one size fits all approach does not seem to work for many cities, due to cultural and societal differences. With the growing population and the need for better services, African Cities have to prepare. The City of Windhoek in Namibia is selected. Participants are engaged using interviews and online questionnaire. Current smart city assessment models were considered. The paper explains what the current stakeholders in Windhoek understand about smart cities. We considered their understanding and applied one assessment model to check the readiness. Results show that participants are aware of the components and what is needed for a smart city. Based on current ICT infrastructure challenges, it was not clear to clearly rate the City of Windhoek’s readiness. Determining the level or stage where the city is currently at is not easy. The paper presents the current state of City of Windhoek and how one assessment model has been applied to determine the readiness.

Keywords: Smart City, ereadiness, Smart Governance, Innovative technologies, smart technologies, sustainable ICTs, Smart City Maturity Model