Johannesburg, 29 Sep 2021
The arrival of the African region of Amazon Web Services (AWS) region has helped spur smart city innovation among South Africa’s municipalities, declared Clive Charlton, head of solution architecture for Sub-Saharan Africa at AWS.
Charlton was speaking ahead of an AWS webinar on building citizen-focused smart cities of the future.
“We are seeing growing interest in South Africa, especially now that we have the AWS Africa region in the country,” he says. The AWS Africa region opened in Cape Town last year as a continuation of the AWS investment in Africa.
Charlton says: “This helps address any latency for smart city-type services, and also overcomes concerns the public sector had in the past about data residency. Having access to our public cloud is now helping municipalities innovate faster – it means no more long procurement times, and using only what they need when they need it. The cloud also encourages experimentation, as a city could come up with an idea, test it, tear it down and start again very quickly. It lowers the barrier to entry for small and medium municipalities too, as they no longer need large programmes with a lot of funding to start innovating.”
Charlton says local commitment to smart city development is also being spurred by the national government and President Cyril Ramaphosa, who announced in his State of the Nation address this year that three new smart cities were envisaged for South Africa. Says Charlton: “The important thing is to get started, with a top-down run – like the messaging we are seeing from the president himself.”
He says smart city development tends to snowball as local municipalities discover more about what is possible: “It’s a learning process – as public sector entities start using more services, they learn what else is available, and the art of the possible,” he says.
Charlton notes that citizen engagement is crucial in developing smart cities that meet the needs of citizens, and that the local public sector is embracing innovation underpinned by AWS to enable this. An example of this is GovChat, South Africa’s largest civic engagement platform, which was also used to fast-track the SASSA grant application process. GovChat, underpinned by Synthesis technology on AWS, has now processed over 11 million SASSA applications and has 8 million active users.
The AWS webinar Building citizen-focused smart cities of the future is part of a series of events hosted by AWS in collaboration with ITWeb for public sector decision makers. The webinar will be held on 7 October 2021 and will examine how to enhance citizens’ end-to-end experience of public services, resulting in increased transparency and improved service delivery.
To register for this event, go to https://www.itweb.co.za/webinar/building-citizen-focused-smart-cities-of-the-future/
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