Joburg places digital innovation roll-out at heart of smart-city strategy

31st July 2015

By: Sashnee Moodley

Senior Deputy Editor Polity and Multimedia

  

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The City of Johannesburg is aiming to digitally empower citizens by ensuring that they are fluent in the uses and possibilities of the digital space.

Speaking at the Hack.Jozi awards ceremony in Johannesburg earlier this month, City of Johannesburg mayor Parks Tau said digital access was becoming as much an equity issue as access to water and electricity. The city has, therefore, invested in digital projects to technologically empower citizens and even municipal employees.

The City of Johannesburg has partnered with the University of Johannesburg (UJ) to help citizens access the digital ambassadors programme.

The programme, which follows the approval of a partnership between the City of Johannesburg and Harambee Youth Accelerator – a youth development social enterprise forged by the private sector – for one year, is expected to break down barriers to opportunities for about 200 000 young people in the city by 2016.

UJ has built an incubation pipeline for 3 000 young digi-entrepreneurs, who will be contracted and incubated according to the principles of the Jozi@Work programme, which is designed to create opportunities for communities to partner with the city in the delivery of municipal services in their neighbourhoods.

The digi-entrepreneurs will execute city contracting under the supervision and developmental support of UJ as their capability support agent.

“These digi-enterprises will promote the Maru a Jozi cloud platform, which will, by the end of July, provide a free-to-use platform through which citizens can engage with the city, report problems and flag issues for the city’s attention. This will build on the nationally renowned citizen engagement engine that has driven the Joburg Roads Agency’s Find and Fix app,” said Tau.

The Maru a Jozi platform will also help bridge the digital divide, as it will provide free access to certain important and credible online services, including maps, search engines and banking, provided they are accessed using the platform.

Tau said this was part of a much bigger process, whereby the City of Johannesburg was using digital processes to re-energise and refine the way it conducted business.

He stated that a digital revolution must disrupt life in every corner of the city for the better.

Vulindlel’ eJozi Programme
The Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE) has teamed up with the City of Johannesburg for its Vulindlel’ eJozi programme.

Tau said in his State of the City Address in May that the programme was an “innovative response to the massive problem of youth unemployment”.

The programme is funded by city government as a comprehensive youth empowerment initiative and is delivered by Harambee Youth Accelerator that is the project partner and lead implementer.

Vulindlel’ eJozi offers advisory, placement, assessment, training, work readiness and opportunity readiness services to 200 000 economically disconnected youth in the City of Johannesburg.

All the opportunity channels under the programme start with digital interactions, often involving massive open online course content worldwide, with on-site facilitators and trainers at sites connected to the programme’s libraries.

These have been named Massive Open Online Varsities (MOOVs), and they are becoming the frontline of the Vulindlel’ eJozi programme.

In the coming weeks, the City of Johannesburg will guide participants through opportunity preparation at these MOOVs, from digital literacy, functional literacy and numeracy to advanced coursework linked to specific jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities.

The programme will induct its first group of Vulindlel’ eJozi Web design and continent management entrepreneurs in the coming weeks.

Tau said the City of Johannesburg recognised the vast untapped potential of its citizens, which the new digital era could unlock, but added that the backbone of unlocking this potential had to be widely available Internet access.

The City of Johannesburg has laid 900 km of high-speed fibre-optic cable for faster Internet connection speeds and Tau believes this could turn the Internet into a genuine public good for the city – first through the 1 000 free WiFi hot spots the City is rolling out and then through universal, free basic access to 300 MB worth of data per person per day.

Tau said the City of Johannesburg could carry the redistributive cost to fix a market failure because that was what a developmental government did.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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