An Assessment of the Efficiency of Smart City Facilities in Developing Countries: the Case of Yaoundé, Cameroon

This chapter assesses the efficiency of smart city facilities in developing countries to demonstrate how smart solutions are used to address day-to-day problems and to evaluate the efficiency of these solutions in a smart city context. We start by clarifying the smart city concept in terms of characteristics, evolution, dimensions, definitions, applications, and evaluation before studying the city of Yaoundé, its problems, the solutions, and an assessment of its performance in a smart city context. Yaoundé is the densely populated city in Cameroon with an important economic life which faces daily security, environmental, infrastructural, and administrative challenges. These challenges are addressed by different institutions with solutions using information and communications technologies (ICTs) especially to be reachable. For the evaluation of smart city facilities in Yaoundé, we use the revised triple helix framework with the actors and components of smart city. The main result is the fact that Yaoundé is moving to be a smart city, but there are several things that governments and actors in the process may adopt such as the coordination that seems to be the main obstacle at the moment.