Leveraging on open data to solve city challenges: A case study of Windhoek municipality

Today, cities across the world are faced with numerous challenges, which put a lot of pressure on city resources. Hence, the need for cities to address challenges they are facing in a smart, efficient and effective manner. Technological advancements present vast opportunities to shape up how cities are managed and deliver public services. The notion of smart city has emerged as a key strategy to mitigate issues such as waste management, traffic congestions, air pollution, and to anticipate future challenges. Europe is leading the smart city revolution with at least one smart city in every one of the 28 European Union countries. However, in this age of massive urbanization, other cities are increasingly following this path, adopting scalable and solutions that leverage on the power of open data and ICT to deliver better services, increase quality of life and meet the aspirations of citizens. Today, Windhoek is faced with challenge of massive urban migration and its population is anticipated to grow above half a million mark by 2030. This paper demonstrates how open data can be visualised into applications that connect citizens to the city public transportation to enhance service delivery. Thus, making public services easily accessible, more efficient and effective.