Kenya is set to borrow ideas from a campus in China’s Shenzhen City to lift Konza Smart City to a technology hub in Africa, officials have said.
Ms Pamela Tutui, a director at Konza Technopolis Development Authority (KoTDA) who last week led the agency’s senior staff in a fact-finding mission to Huawei campus in Shenzhen City, said the team was making “some good progress” in achieving the dream. The Huawei campus’s adaptation to technology and industrialisation has seen its population grow from about 300, 000 to 16 million people in the 40 years, about 90 percent of them youth entrepreneurs.
The campus alone, standing in a five-kilometre square land, with meandering rivers, a natural lake and surrounded by well-conserved hills has employed more than 20, 000 engineers who ensure Huawei remains a competitive telecommunications firm. “We are encouraged by what we have witnessed at the campus and we want to get the best technology to develop the city back home,” Ms Tutui said, adding KoTDA was collaborating with Huawei to develop Konza.
“At the end of it, we intend to have a smart city, but it entails a lot. We will have facilities like hotels, housing facilities and office blocks; it’s going to be a city of the future,” said Ms Tutui.
The government has allocated Sh10 billion towards the project, but procurement and other administrative bureaucracies have delayed programmes.
Mr Dalmar Abdi, communications director at Huawei Technologies Kenya said the firm had completed installation of modern communication technologies to actualise the Konza Smart City. “Konza Smart City is going to be something that we Kenyans and Africans are going to be proud of. We are talking of a facility to accommodate tens and thousands of students whose security is a critical component,” said Mr Dalmar.
PAYE Tax Calculator
Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
