This description is found in the IBM press release, on PR Newswire:

The single biggest challenge facing African cities is improving access to and quality of city services such as water and transportation. IBM, in collaboration with government, industry and academia, plans to develop Intelligent Operation Centers for African cities — integrated command centers — that can encompass social and mobile computing, geo-spatial and visual analytics, and information models to enable smarter ways of managing city services. The initial focus will be on smarter water systems and traffic management solutions for the region.

It sounds like a bold statement and move by IBM. Usually the top challenges in Africa are said to be internecine conflict, corruption and bureaucracy, which tend to keep businesses away.

If infrastructure development now has manageable risks then the stage could finally be set for explosive growth by business investment in areas without legacy systems to get in the way. That seems somewhat optimistic, though, given Kenya’s ongoing corruption problems.

Another possible explanation for IBM’s confidence in this venture is related to rising U.S. State Department interest in strategic influence over communication and information systems of Africa (Kenya ranks 3rd on the Net Index).

It will be interesting to see how Kenya handles the risks and liabilities that come from a foreign entity building big data repositories for them and a “smarter” critical infrastructure. The U.S. military has made it pretty clear they tend to want to predict movements of certain people on the Horn of Africa, especially when FBI are on the ground in Somalia. Military, intel and business objectives have an obvious overlap in the IBM proposal to build “command centers” and “traffic management solutions for the region”.