IMD’s Smart Cities Ranking 2025 has offered detailed insights into how cities across the globe, including those on the African continent, are becoming smarter, more connected, and more sustainable.
The report recently revealed that major African cities earned mixed results, with impressive improvements recorded for some, and continuous urban challenges mentioned for others.
According to the report, Cairo is the highest-ranked African city, but was named 117th on the global list, which highlights its ongoing issues with infrastructure and affordable housing. Coming second in Africa is Rabat (123rd in the world), while 3rd-place Cape Town was listed as 123rd on the global scale, indicating very small progress in general, but good signs for improvement.
Algiers held Africa’s 4th position with 5th-place Abuja moving up two places to be 133rd in the world, which was a slight improvement for the Nigerian city. Lagos also moved up to 135th globally, which signifies little progress in its smart city development, however, Nairobi dropped to 136th, 5 places lower than the previous year, highlighting the increasing challenges facing the Kenyan city, including a lack of adequate basic services, restricted access to healthcare, lingering safety concerns and high rate of unemployment.
Accra and Tunis are way down on the ranking because of their ever-present housing affordability problems, infrastructure underdevelopment, and governance issues. They also lost a lot of points for their lack of proper infrastructure and evident poor management of urban density.
Across African cities like Nairobi, Lagos and Accra, housing costs and restricted public transport continue to affect the quality of life and economic productivity negatively, and until these issues are addressed, transformative development is not guaranteed.
African cities that went up the rankings prove that strategic solutions prove that strategic solutions in infrastructure and governance can deliver huge rewards. And Lagos and Abuja have definitely shown how effective urban development initiatives can go a long way towards guaranteeing sustainable progress.
The Smart Cities Index does its assessment with a major focus on structure and technology, and under both areas of concentration, sectors like health and safety, mobility, activities, opportunities, and governance are closely looked at. The rankings are according to survey data from 120 residents in all cities, researched over the past 3 years, to offer a detailed overview of progress.
