Saturday, February 8, 2025

PPADB approves Huawei’s safer city project

The Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Board (PPADB) has approved tender for Botswana Police Services’ request for direct appointment of Huawei Technologies Botswana and ICT Dynamix for the supply, delivery, installation, configuration and commissioning of additional cameras for the safer city solution. 

The Board published the spot announcement advertisement earlier this week. 

The safer city project entails installation of closed-circuit television surveillance system and it ranks high among Botswana Police Services’ development initiatives. 

To this end, this surveillance capability has been deployed in the city of Gaborone and is being extended to Francistown. The government is confident that this capacity which calls for more funding will take a leading role in improving public safety where it is deployed. 

Just recently, when presenting his committee of supply speech in parliament for the financial year 2020/21 budget, Minister of Defence, Justice and Security, Kagiso Mmusi requested the sum of P77,7million to continue financing the upgrading and expansion of the radio communication system, surveillance systems and the automated fingerprint system; installation of an incident management system for the safer city project; and the roll out of the human resource management system to all police districts systems. 

Recognizing that criminals are increasingly taking advantage of the emerging technologies to offend, the police service continues to build its capacity to operate effectively on the cyber space. 

To this end, Mmusi said public safety infrastructure continues to be developed to aid prevention as well as the detection of crime. 

In April 2015, the Chinese multinational ICT firm Huawei hosted its inaugural Safe City Africa Summit in Cape Town, South Africa and announced its strategy to engage with regions across Africa on the adoption of a consolidated IT platform – one based on the provision of public safety information in collaboration with multi-agency emergency and law-enforcement to help establish the ‘Safe City’ concept.

Huawei has in recent years been meeting with several government leaders in Africa to detail how its safe city solution could be used to facilitate a continent-wide network of safe cities.

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