Huawei has shared details of the effectiveness of a safe city solution it has rolled out in two of Kenya's busiest cities. Nairobi and Mombasa now boast Africa's most extensive deployment of the ICT company's Safe City solution for use during emergency response, as part of evidence collection by security agencies and in order to prevent incidents from occurring.

The Chinese ICT firm teamed up with Safaricom to implement the first phase of Kenya's Safe City project with new ICT, covering the most densely populated capital and port city. Following the completion of the project, the two cities have improved their local security - the crime rate dropped by 46% from 2014 to 2015 in areas covered by the Safe City project, according to the Kenya Police annual report.

Dean Yu, CEO of Huawei Kenya said, "Before we deployed this system, when criminals wanted to do something they just did it. They did not fear, but now there are many cameras over the cities so when people want to do something they see the camera and ask themselves whether they should do it. The second point is that when you go into this system you find a lot of features and functions like the tacking of car registrations numbers and the recording of videos so the evidence is being gathered and it could also help the police to present evidence in court. Our feeling is that the criminals fear a lot more and car theft as well as pickpocketing have been reduced."

Yu adds that the showcase of the safe city solution in Nairobi as part of the Huawei Safe City Africa Summit is in order to share the success the company has achieved in the country with the rest of the world.

The Huawei Safe City Summit has previously been held in Mexico on two occasions, in Dubai and more recently in Shanghai in September 2016.

Diana Yuan, President of Marketing & Solution Sales Dept of Huawei Enterprise Business Group says public safety is gradually becoming a necessity to raise living standards for everyone.

"The Summit today is of special significance. You can personally experience practical applications of safe city solutions. Adhering to the principle of customer centricity, Huawei cooperates with partners and customers to build smarter, safer, and better connected Safe Cities with our new ICT infrastructure featuring Cloud-Pipe-Device integration. Huawei's Safe City solutions will comprehensively improve city management and contribute to city safety and prosperity in African countries."

The solution

The safe city solution consists of a virtualised and converged command system, a 4G professional trunking system as well as cross-region and cross-agency video cloud.

Rose Moyo, Wireless Solutions Director Huawei Enterprise Business Group in Eastern and Southern Africa says a wider roll out of the solution in more African cities will depend on the interest shown by governments.

"Huawei has a presence in most of the African countries and we have been engaging at different levels with municipal governments in order to create safer cities and environments. We are not looking only at challenges in terms of security like incidents terrorism, we are also looking at enabling the flow of traffic. It is more than just looking at terrorist attacks. We have engaged all the cities in Africa, but it is up to the governments to engage with stakeholders and this is why the adoption might be slower in other regions more that others. It has been accelerated in Kenya today where we are hosting this function."

Shaka Kwach, Head of Special Projects department at Safaricom Limited confirmed that deployments of Huawei's Safe City solution in Nairobi and Mombasa has drastically improved criminal investigation, cross-agency collaboration, and emergency response efficiency for the National Police Service.

Huawei's Safe City ecosystem is developed in collaboration consulting firms (BGS and Accenture), system integrators (Safaricom and Tyco), and software vendors (Hexagon, Milestone, SAP, iOmniscient, Promad, and AgentVi).