Local authorities urged to embrace new technology

Ivan Zhakata Herald Correspondent

The four urban councils in Harare Metropolitan need to embrace new technology to upgrade service delivery in smarter cities, Provincial Development Coordinator for Harare Metropolitan Mr Tafadzwa Muguti said recently.

Touring Telone’s Call Centre, Data Centre and National Operations Centre in Harare, Mr Muguti said local authorities needed to be able to improve the quality of service delivery through advancing technology.

The tour was attended by the Minister of State for Harare Metropolitan Province and Devolution Oliver Chidau, both mayors and both chairmen from the municipalities and town boards in Harare Metropolitan Province, their town clerks and councillors.

“As Harare Metropolitan Province we are on a drive to build smart cities,” said Mr Muguti. “When people hear about smart cities, they think about the pavements being cleaned and sewers being attended to. That is part of the smart cities but the smart cities concept is leveraged on how you manage effectively the deployment of those services.

“Wherever you go across the world, technology is behind the concept of smart cities. Through technology we are going to know which streets are not cleaned, which water pipes have burst, which sewer pipes are burst and which services are not being delivered correctly.”

Mr Muguti wanted to avoid local authorities from saying they could not provide quality service delivery because they do not have a budget to buy new services.

Harare Institute of Technology was going to install the Local Authority Digital System (LADS) for the City of Harare, Municipality of Chitungwiza, and the local boards for Epworth and Ruwa in Telone’s Data Centre to ensure that they have access to the internet.

Mr Muguti said data servers from local authorities will be relocated to Telone’s Data Centre to ensure no manipulation of data by councils.

“We want the whole of our CBD to have live cameras and data,” he said. “The nice thing about that is that information will be going directly to the cloud. It is part of the project that we would like to undertake to ensure that we are a smart city.

“Connectivity is going to be essential because through LADS councilors can log in and see the statistics and analytics of what is coming across so we are looking at LTE for councilors. Gone are the days where we say there is no internet connectivity at the local authority or at the district office. We are in the era of devolution and cannot devolve central government and local government if we do not have connectivity.”