" ITREALMS: Smart cities must be innovative, sustainable – DG NITDA

Friday, August 11, 2017

Smart cities must be innovative, sustainable – DG NITDA

The Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Dr. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami, has said that smart cities must thrive to be innovative and sustainable, reports ITRealms.

Pantami disclosed this to ITRealms at the Smart Cities summit in Abuja on Wednesday during a session on ‘Smart Technologies and Infrastructure: Communications Technologies, Platforms and IOT Aplications for Smart Cities.”

“We should be innovative about it and ensure implementations are sustainable,” he declared.

He is convinced that commitment to the development of Smart Cities in Nigeria, will encourage the rapid advances in Internet of Things (IoTs) technologies, platforms, tools and other related technologies, inclusive of mobile and cloud technologies, capable of developing the technological landscape of nation and making lives livable for the people.

The focus, he said, should be on short and long terms plans for building green field cities as well as rebuilding or retrofitting existing cities to be smart, future ready and sustainable. We need to be conscious of climate change. There is need to build a sustainable business model, our own architecture for smart initiatives and ensure the right infrastructure are available.

Pantami pointed out that infrastructure such as broadband, 5G, electricity, smart devices and agents, smart urban spaces, web-based applications, mobile technologies and e-services as well as open government data issues are crucial to achieving sustainable smart cities.

“You may recall that The Nigeria Smart City Initiative (NSCI) was created and established in February 2016 by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) to reflect the agency’s then vision of championing e-governance in Nigeria,” he said, stressing that NITDA did this with the aim of providing the enabling environment and capacity for local governments and private enterprises to improve the quality of city environment and lives of the people.

NSCI, he said, has some key principles and strategies: Public Private Partnership (PPP) driven and Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, which encouraged tools and solutions to be designed with scalability in mind with a view to enable replicability and measurability.


“The programme is also tied to the agency’s collaborations with the National Information Agency (NIA) of South Korea and the World e-Government Organization of Cities and Local Government (WeGO),” he said.

Uboshe Uboshe/Doris Minimah/GEE
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