Think Public Safety

Promoting Safer Cities and Secure Businesses in Africa Author: Jerry Nachmann

Created Oct 02 2015, 5:00 AM by Paul Jeffs

We live in a world where more people are moving out of rural areas into city environments and the cities are growing and becoming mega cities. When you move into a city, you become more dependent on water and power supply, on transportation and municipal services.

As cities get bigger and population density rises, the demands on city infrastructure and services grow. All this comes with a need to provide a safe and secure urban environment to facilitate economic growth and development.

At the same time, there are constraints on the natural and public resources available, such as limited manpower, road infrastructure, electricity or water supplies. This is especially apparent during emergencies.

Whilst in the year 2000 about 35% of Africans in Sub-Saharan Africa lived in cities, this number is estimated to reach more than 50% by the end of 2015.

How can we manage these growing cities, particularly in times of crisis related to crime, terrorism or weather? One answer is to have stronger coordination and interoperability between agencies. Police, fire and medical services co-ordinate and work closely together today but this needs to be extended to include other city agencies to provide a truly comprehensive response.

Motorola has been studying how to improve interagency cooperation and has developed collaboration communications systems and software to help. We provide Safe City Command and Control solutions, integrating cameras, pollution sensors, emergency buttons, social media feeds, infrastructure failure alerts etc. to facilitate the flow of data, providing situational awareness to first responders and turning vast amounts of collected data into actionable intelligence.

In late 2012 Motorola came to Johannesburg with our Safer Cities, Secure Businesses conference series. The idea was to bring our solutions into the local urban environments, to show, demonstrate and interact with decision makers in the environments where the needs are real. To provide an intimate environment in which a select set of representatives and decision makers from Public Service agencies and private enterprises can interact with our experts and get a hands-on understanding of the value provided by targeted smart public safety and communication solutions.

We have since held conferences in Dakar, Lusaka, Cape Town, Yaounde, Kinshasa and Luanda. We have hosted more than 500 guests, some who have become our customers and many are actively engaged in providing a safer and more secure urban and business environment.