Cairo leading African city on 2023 Smart City Index

18 / 04 / 2023

By Marwa Nassar - -

Cairo is the leading African city on the 2023 Smart City Index (SCI) as it ranked no 108 among 141 cities worldwide. The index offers a balanced focus on economic and technological aspects of smart cities on the one hand, and “humane dimensions” of smart cities (quality of life, environment, inclusiveness) on the other.

The coverage of the SCI and SCI Report has increased by 20 percent to include 141 cities (previously 118 were measured), distributed across the world. This reflects the SCI’s ongoing efforts to be a global index, and to facilitate the benchmarking of all kinds of cities, whatever their size or level of development.

The Index, produced by The Smart City Observatory, part of the IMD World Competitiveness Center, differs from others by being citizen-centric. It combines hard data and survey responses to show the extent to which technology is enabling cities to address the challenges they face to achieve a higher quality of life for their inhabitants.

This year, the IMD Smart City Observatory has made a concerted effort to include more capital cities from all continents, while keeping an eye on ‘second-tier cities’ showing signs of dynamism, and an appetite for designing and implementing innovative solutions to their key problems.

This edition marks a significant step in the history of this report, which has now acquired global recognition and respect.

The SCI’s methodology has been improved thanks to the acquisition of new data at the city level. The SCI was designed as a tool for action. Since it is based on people’s perceptions (surveys), it is critically important that the answers collected are calibrated to the specific context of the cities studied.

The initial effort to produce what should become an internationally recognized global smart city index consists of two distinct phases and deliverables.

First, a set of case studies of smart cities at different stages of development, providing diverse international basis of experience, with the purpose of enhancing the realism and pertinence of the model underpinning the index to be proposed.

Second, the first iteration of the index methodology was defined, leading to a global ranking of smart cities along that index in 2019. Now we are proud to present the fourth edition.

For the 2021 Index and all prior editions, the observatory relied on country-level Human Development Index (HDI) data provided by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

The basic principle that led to the creation of the Smart City Index in 2019 was that if cities wanted to be smarter, they needed to be less technology-centric, and more human-focused. Since then, this way of conceiving the nature and purpose of smart cities has moved closer to being mainstream.

Many city officials are now routinely using a variety of different expressions in lieu of ‘smart cities’: ‘open and innovative cities’,’ inclusive and diverse cities’, ‘sustainable cities’ and ‘citizen centric cities’ are becoming part of the new labelling of ‘smart cities’ that were. But this is not merely a semantic change; it reflects deep changes in the way smart cities (and cities in general) will be designed and managed.

Thanks to its initial design and philosophy, the Smart City Index is emerging as a critical tool to benchmark progress along those new lines. The SCI’s updated methodology will further enhance its relevance as these changes gather momentum.

There are different ways to improve the quality of the SCI. Expanding the number of cities studied will always extend the scope of the index. Employing more focused data will improve the accuracy of the index and allow for a meaningful comparison among different qualities of cities. Finally, fine tuning the construction of the ranking improves its relevance as an action tool, and allows for better comparisons between cities.

The 2023 SCI makes advances in all three dimensions. Using city-specific data for the construction of the Index was the focus of the research in 2022. In its new design, the SCI employs a city-specific measure of the HDI initially produced by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite index that combines information about life expectancy, expected years of schooling and the mean years of education completed, as well as the per capita income of a country’s citizens. Until this year, the SCI used country-level HDI information as a proxy to evaluate the dimensions of health, knowledge and standard of living in each city.

The 2023 SCI features city-level HDI, provided by the Global Data Lab. This allows for a more accurate ranking of each city, whilst also allowing readers to compare the performance of any given city to that of the country in which it is found.

Finally, city-level HDI facilitates a more academically rigorous comparison among cities. The 2023 SCI standardizes the performance of a city with the average of the city-HDI and the average of the surveys. This allows for a meaningful classification of a city relative to all other cities covered by the Index.