Smart Economy in Smart African Cities

Since 2014, Dr. Gora Mboup has been the President and CEO of GORA Corp. He has more than 25 years of international development experience, including ten years as a Coordinator of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) funded by United States Agency for International Development (USAID). He joined the UN-Habitat in 2004 as a Senior Demographer and Head of the Global Urban Observatory (GUO). In June 2014, the UN-Habitat honored him with a plaque in recognition of ten years of distinguished and dedicated service to the United Nations.  Dr. Mboup co-authored the book Smart Economy in Smart Cities and the book Smart Metropolitan Regional Development: Economic and Spatial Design Strategies published in 2017 and 2018 by Springer respectively. During his tenure with UN-Habitat, Dr. Mboup authored the book Street as Public Spaces and Drivers of Urban Prosperity in 2013 and four series of the State of World Cities: 1) SWCR 2012/13 - Prosperity of Cities; 2) SWCR 2010/11 - Bridging the Urban Divide; 3) SWCR 2008/09 - Harmonious Cities; 4) SWCR 2006/07 -Thirty years of the Habitat Agenda. Dr. Mboup also contributed to the book Urban Planet - Knowledge Towards Sustainable Cities published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press with the chapter 39 The digital urbanization and the end of big cities. Dr. Mboup is an international consultant on smart cities, sustainable urban development and smart mobility with the World Bank, UN-Habitat, UNECA, African Union, national governments and local authorities. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Global City Institute (GCI) of the University of Toronto and provides public lectures in several universities such as London School of Economics (UK), Columbia University (USA), University of Twente (ITC, The Netherlands) and Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden).   Prof. Oyebanji Oyeyinka is the former Director of the UN-Habitat's Regional Office for Africa and former Director of its Monitoring and Research Division and Senior Scientific Advisor to the Executive Director. Prior to joining the UN-Habitat, Prof. Oyeyinka was a Professor and remains a professorial fellow at the United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT) until December 2006. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Open University, UK. He worked with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) as a Senior Economic Affairs Officer and coordinating the 10-year review of the least developed countries (LDCs). Prior to that he was a Professor at the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER), Ibadan, Nigeria.  Professor Oyeyinka obtained his D.Phil. in Technology Policy and Industrialization from the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex, Masters in Engineering from the University of Toronto after a First Class (Honours) degree from the University of Ife, Nigeria. He has done considerable work on information and communication technologies (ICTs) and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and clusters within the systems of innovation framework. He is an author as well as a joint-author to several books, the most recent being Structural Transformation and Economic Development: Cross-regional analysis of Urbanization and Industrialization; UK: Routledge, 2016.