Smart Social Development Key for Smart Economy

Abstract

A smart city is viewed as a sustainable, inclusive and prosperous city that promotes a people-centric approach based on three core components and seven dimensions. The three core components are Smart City Foundation, Smart ICT and Smart Institutions and Laws, which in turn are the pillars of the seven dimensions of a smart city: Infrastructure Development, Environmental Sustainability, Social Development, Social Inclusion, Disasters Exposure, Resilience and Peace and Security. The three components together with the seven dimensions make a Smart Economy. This chapter focuses on one of the dimensions of smart cities, the Social Development which is composed of elements of education, health, social inclusion, social capital, population dynamics and other variables. The first section of this chapter is on Education, which is critical to meeting the challenges of smart city, as it connects people to new approaches, solutions and technologies that enable them to identify, clarify and tackle local and global problems. The second section on health considering that healthy population is critical to realizing economic growth through increased productivity. Healthy workers are more productive, bringing greater income to families and higher levels of economic growth for nations, and then enhance. When education and health are combined, they contribute significantly to human development. In both dimensions, the agglomeration has Dakar as the rest of Senegal has made significant progress during these past twenty years. With the decline in fertility and mortality rates, the population of Dakar is marked by a massive youth population (with a median age of 23.2 years) that constitute a potential urban demographic dividend which is the focus of the third section. However, due to high unemployment rates, this demographic dividend has not been fully utilized; most young people are still depend to their parents, thanks to the high social capital in Dakar as in the rest of Senegal. The last section focuses on the social capital in Dakar expressed within the family as well as in the communities through public spaces and social media.