When you fly into any of Hamad International Airport, Doha, King Khalid International Airport, Riyadh, or Dubai International Airport, Dubai, it is difficult to believe that these cities were once where most African cities are.
A few years ago, rural to urban migration was a big problem for many Middle Eastern nations, a situation African countries currently find themselves in. It led to congestion, city pollution, pressure on existing transport infrastructure, and drag on low to middle-class growth.
Today, the story is different because of the various countries’ decisions to prioritise investment in smart mobility that will in turn power ambitious smart city projects.
A report from the International Data Corporation (IDC) estimated that the region has invested about $2.3 billion in smart city technologies by the end of 2021.
The rapid push for smart city technologies is part of measures to address the region’s challenges of population growth and increased consumption while unlocking economic and sustainability benefits.
Anthony Butler, chief technology officer of IBM Middle East, who spoke at the LEAP Technology conference in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, noted that 65 percent of the world will be living in the cities by 2050. This is why it has become imperative for countries to re-imagine how their cities are planned, with particular emphasis on mobility.
Nations in the Middles East have become aggressive in pursuing this mandate. The number of people in the Middle East has grown to 456 million as of 2021 from 411 million in 2016. In that same period, Africa’s population grew to 1.37 billion from 1.2 billion.
While African countries lag even with an exploding population on their hands, in the Middle East, agencies and governments are racing to adopt smarter, safer, cleaner, and more efficient transportation systems and solutions to improve the mobility of cities or entire countries and to improve the lifestyle of the region’s population.
You see this as you make your way through the airports to the cities’ multiple transport systems. For instance, while in Lagos, Nigeria, you have to shove your way through a crowd of people, immigration officers, and airport staff to catch a flight. In Doha or Riyadh, you have multiple transport options like a speed train ride within the airport, a special assistance vehicle and other modern means of catching your flight without breaking a sweat.
What is smart mobility?
According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), smart mobility uses innovative digital technologies and solutions to create open and connected transportation networks that can move people and freight more efficiently and sustainably than in the past.
Smart mobility has huge benefits for countries like Nigeria with urban mobility and congestion problems in cities like Lagos, Port Harcourt, Onitsha. Lagos, for example, loses over N4 trillion annually to traffic congestion, according to research by the Danne Institute.
The amount lost is a culmination of the 14.12 million hours lost by Lagosians while commuting to work on a daily basis. With the population of the state set to grow even further from the current estimates of 20 million, the traffic congestion is unlikely to go away if nothing is urgently done to address it.
The state government has over the years made efforts to address these problems, but as countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar have shown, it requires an elaborate and deliberate national effort to achieve. It is not enough to just widen existing roads or build new roads, bridges, and other traditional infrastructure. Experts say governments need to rethink their approach to transportation and focus on smart mobility.
Smart mobility is a national agenda
For a country like Nigeria, having an efficient technology-driven transport system should be a national mandate. For Saudi Arabia, the journey to smart city and mobility formally kicked off in 2016 with the unveiling of the Saudi Vision 2020, “a strategic framework to reduce Saudi Arabia’s dependence on oil, diversify its economy and develop public service sectors such as transport, health, education, infrastructure, recreation, and tourism,” a statement from LEAP noted. The country is currently hosting over 100,000 delegates from around the world at the global tech conference.
Smart mobility being nationally driven ensures the government can easily bring together all the states to find a sustainable approach to creating a sustainable smart transport infrastructure that links businesses and individuals from one part of the country to another.
In Saudi Arabia, the investments are also driven by a collective agenda of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) for smart mobility offerings, using innovative digital technologies and solutions to create open and connected transportation networks in the region that can move people and freight more efficiently and sustainably than in the past. The kingdom and other GCC countries have since expended billions of dollars to bring this project to fruition.
In Dubai, which has deployed the most investments in smart cities and mobility, projects such as the Bluewaters Group Transit and the introduction of autonomous aerial vehicles serve as benchmarks for future autonomous vehicle projects throughout the Middle East.
Government-led but private-sector driven
In as much as the governments in the Middle East have committed substantial capital to smart mobility, the private sector drives the actual development.
This means that contract issuing is not a primary concern of the government, the private sector is very involved in the conceptualisation, building, and delivery processes. That way the entire process is transparent and there is accountability. It also builds the confidence of investors to be part of the vision.
This approach is responsible for the several mega-city projects being undertaken by several private organisations in the kingdom. One of the projects known as the LINE involves the construction of a 170-kilometre (106 miles) belt of connected communities without the need for cars or roads and will house more than 1 million people.
The project will be completely free of cars and streets, with residents given access to nature and all of their daily needs within a walking distance. The private consortium behind the project says that the linear development of hyper-connected artificial intelligence-enabled communities will be powered by 100 percent clean energy.
The kingdom’s smart cities market size is projected to reach $14.7 billion in 2027 from $3.55 billion in 2019, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.6 percent from 2020 to 2027.
A governance framework and regulations
A viable smart mobility project should be accompanied by a governance framework and thoughtful regulations. These two require legislative action and involvement from multiple jurisdictions.
Innovators in Saudi Arabia can now patent their innovations because of the creation of new regulations for technology innovations. This encourages investors to see value where the opportunities are to deploy their capital.
The regulations would also improve data governance given that a lot of data can be derived from transport technology systems.
There is funding for smart mobility
Nigeria and many African countries have always used the availability of funding as an excuse to not aggressively pursue technology upgrades of transportation systems. The Middle East in contrast shows it is doable and the government doesn’t have to bear all the financial burden.
By creating an enabling environment, investors are able to see value in investing in smart mobility.
Also, there are innovative ways of raising finance. One of them being explored is the use of cryptocurrencies. Smart city developers are leveraging digital assets to fund their projects. Unfortunately, many African countries are not favourably disposed to cryptocurrencies.
Butler however said the city of the future would be a city based on data and this could be tokenised.
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