The Mekong Business Initiative (MBI) opened the competition in July 2017, inviting entries suggesting solutions for challenges in developing smart cities in 12 fields specified by Vietnam’s local administrations.
These fields include low-cost housing, efficient energy use, traffic management and smart parking, water drainage and waste management, urban agriculture, water treatment and clean water supply, public security and natural disaster monitoring, ecotourism and environment planning, health care, education, e-government, and trees and public space.
MBI Director Dominic Mellor said demand for innovative solutions to develop cities in Vietnam has never been as big as now, with rapid growth and city dwellers’ surging demand outpacing infrastructure in cities.
SCIC will help Vietnam access technologies and solutions already proving effective around the world. It will also help the country apply these solutions locally, he added. This competition, sponsored by the Australian Government and the Asian Development Bank, attracted 197 entries from more than 30 countries.
The 15 selected teams will present their solutions to authorised agencies and potential partners and investors in Vietnam in Hanoi on November 12 and 13. The best three teams will receive cash prizes and have the chance to take part in start-up acceleration programmes in Vietnamese cities to carry out their solutions.
Vietnam has one of the highest urbanisation speeds in Southeast Asia – 3.4 percent a year. Population in urban areas accounted for 35.7 percent of the national total. It is estimated that urban populations will reach 40 percent of the country’s total by 2020. However, the quality of urban areas in Vietnam is low due to lack of integrated infrastructure and slowness in building it compared to socio-economic development.
Sharing experience in building smart cities in Germany, Jörg Rüger, First Secretary for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Urban Development at the Embassy of Germany in Hanoi, said digitalisation would fundamentally change the way people lived and worked.
