Claro Chile, a subsidiary of Mexico's América Móvil, is involved in two smart city projects and wants to establish itself as an integrator and facilitator of urban solutions.
“The demand for solutions for smart cities is constantly growing due to several global trends such as the concentration of population in cities, security and the incorporation of sustainability variables in urban development and urban mobility,” Francisco Guzmán Marín, vice president of B2B unit Claro Empresas, told BNamericas.
As digitization increases, vast amounts of data will be collected, analyzed and stored. According to Forbes, the world produces more than 2.5 trillion bytes of data every day. The corresponding challenge is to create the platforms to support these volumes of data.
In the case of smart cities, platforms help manage the collection and processing of data from multiple sources to provide information on topics of interest such as weather conditions, events, parking, or transportation, both for analysis, and decision making.
All Latin American countries should consider five key elements for their respective digital transformation agendas, according to an expert.
Countries should focus on a strong institution, a set of concrete objectives, financial resources, technology tools, and human talent, Miguel Porrúa, e-government specialist and digital cluster coordinator at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), told BNamericas.
Read more: The 5 elements Latin American digital agendas should contain
Several Latin American countries have unveiled new digital development agendas during 2021 for the coming years.
The most recent case was Mexico, which three years after the start of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government, created a framework for its digital strategy.
Read more: The digital strategies of Latin American governments
alk to any taxi driver, student or small businessman from Mexico down to Argentina, and they’ll likely make one thing clear: Latin America has a corruption problem. The solution, however, may lie less in the legislatures of Bogotá, Brasília and Buenos Aires and more in the tech incubators of Silicon Valley, São Paulo, Medellín and Guadalajara.
In the past couple of years, a wave of anti-establishment candidates running — and winning — on vague platforms of combatting graft has shown just how salient the issue of corruption is in Latin America. Indeed, it is likely the region’s greatest ill, actively working against prosperity and progress. It’s not a new phenomenon, but one that’s now risen to the top of the agenda — and for good reason.
Read more: Latin America needs more tech in government to counter graft