Huawei held a summit in Cape Town to discuss ICT solutions for urban safety in Africa
Guests from around the world, including government ministers and more than 400 industry players attended the Safe City Africa Summit this week, sharing insights and discussing development trends and potential solutions to problems such as urban crime.
The theory behind the event was that the increasing urbanisation of the global population, coupled with ever-widening Internet access, will “drive the convergence of ICT and urban infrastructure”.
“Urbanization means that a growing population depends on cities to meet their social, environmental and economic needs,” explained Jennifer Belissent, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.
“Safety is fundamental to those needs, and public safety is a concern of city leaders - whether it’s preventing crime, reducing infant mortality or mitigating the effects of natural disasters. Better access to data and new analytics tools makes that job easier.”
To that end, Huawei has developed its own Safe City Solution, which the Chinese ICT firm said can extract clues from large volumes of videos, allowing for effective prevention of, and rapid responses to, a variety of incidents.
Huawei’s Safe City Solution integrates eLTE broadband trunking, video surveillance, unified communications (UC), and video conferencing systems with a computer aided dispatch (CAD) system.
