NITDA highlights smart city technology as key national policy

The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) is to promote the development of smart city technology and projects it as key national policy.

To this end, the agency through the e-Government Unit is set to promote Internet of Things (IoTs) and e-government standard platforms and tools in which disparate systems owned by different federal and state service entities communicate and share information.

The Nigeria smart city development approach must also key into other existing policy provisions such as those of cyber-security, broadband, software and e-government development.

Acting Director General of NITDA, Dr. Vincent Olatunji, who disclosed this at an inaugural meeting of stakeholders in the (NITDA) driven Smart City program in Abuja, observed that the agency is demonstrating a new service delivery paradigm based on multi-stakeholder engagement to develop, deploy and manage smart solutions for the benefit of the average Nigerian citizen.

According to him, the e-Government Unit has nurtured projects owned by states government including traffic flow management, smart flood management, secondary school learning hubs, smart solutions for managing Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), smart Internally Generated Revenue Systems and Integrated Public Transportation Systems between February 2016 till date.

He said: “At an extremely conservative rate of one smart solution in each zone annually, exclusive of Abuja and Lagos which has special status in the program, we are confident of going ‘smart’ in over 50 per cent of our cities by 2019”.