Abidjan's instrumentation sits mostly on things that move: 173 radars and an integrated mobility centre that logged more than seven million camera-caught traffic offences in eleven months of 2024, a bus fare card that became a phone app, and a refuse fleet whose position shows live on a control-room screen west of the city. In parallel the district spent five years giving itself a formal address — 14,279 streets identified and nearly 300,000 building entrances surveyed and numbered by the metre. What the record keeps showing is the distance between measuring and acting: container release at the port is digitised at 0% because the payment at the end of the chain is still made in person, and in June 2026 the fully tracked refuse fleet needed an emergency ministerial order to shift 16,000 tonnes off the streets.
The atlas documents 6 projects in Abidjan, the earliest dating to 2018: 6 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is official (4 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Abidjan is actually doing.
Computed from the 6 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Two systems arrived in 2018, and both were about following something that moves. When the Kossihouen landfill opened that November, replacing a dump that had been open since 1965, it came with bridge scales at the gate and a control room west of the city where the position of every refuse truck appears live; 220 to 230 of them deliver each day, under private concessions rather than direct municipal collection. A month later the main transport operator presented Monpass, a shareable pay-as-you-go fare card alongside personalised season tickets, which grew a mobile app in December 2022 with a virtual card, mobile-money top-up and live tracking of buses approaching a stop. The features are published; the take-up is not — no source gives the number of cards in circulation or the share of journeys paid digitally, which is the figure that would show whether the cash queue actually got shorter.
In 2021 the district gave itself two things it had never had: an address and a radar. The addressing project resurveyed all thirteen communes, identified 14,279 streets and surveyed more than 295,000 of a projected 348,216 building entrances by early 2025, about 256,000 of them stencilled with a number — and the numbering is metric, so the figure on a door states how many metres its entrance lies from the start of the street. The database was delivered with a portal for the tax authority, the statistics institute, the post and the utilities; no source documents a public address search, so what residents get is a plate on the wall. That September the intelligent transport system entered its active phase with 173 fixed radars on nine corridors and an integrated management centre detecting speeding, red lights, illegal parking, phone use and seatbelts automatically.
The most recent layers are a street and a port. In Plateau, the commune signed with a French lighting manufacturer in January 2023 under a French Treasury grant, worked from a lighting master plan that first mapped what was already installed, and inaugurated 121 connected lamps on three central streets in February 2026, each remotely managed from its own light point. No measured saving has been published, which is the recurring pattern in lighting retrofits: telemanagement is bought first and metered later, if at all. At the ports, the single-window agency has been bringing a port community system online module by module, linking shipping lines, forwarders, consignees, terminals, customs and banks.
What the record keeps showing is the distance between the measurement and the thing it was supposed to change. At the port's own mid-term review in February 2026, vessel announcement and the customs manifest were at 100 per cent use, container moves at 60, and release at nought — because the payment at the end of the chain is still made in person, which the agency itself says breaks the concept. On the roads, detection scaled far faster than collection or consent: the transport ministry counted 8,928,453 offences in eleven months of 2024, 7,113,790 of them caught on camera, and by March 2026 Ivorian outlets were reporting owners with accumulated fines they had no prospect of paying and taxi drivers refusing radar-covered routes. And in June 2026 the fully tracked refuse fleet needed an emergency 72-hour ministerial operation that moved about 16,000 tonnes to the landfill and still cleared only about 100 of some 800 reported dump sites — for reasons given as disbursement delays, arrears to operators and weak contract oversight, not missing telemetry.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2018 to 2025. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Abidjan's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Abidjan's instruments mostly work, and each of them stops one step before the transaction that would make it count. The port has a stated next step and a published gap to close it against: electronic release sits at nought per cent while announcement and manifest sit at 100, and the agency has named the reason as a payment that still has to be made physically. Enforcement has the opposite problem — a detection layer running far ahead of any capacity to collect, with the visible consequence so far being drivers avoiding equipped corridors rather than driving differently on them. Two quieter questions matter as much: whether the address register ever becomes something residents can query rather than a plate on a wall, and whether the fare card ever publishes a digital-payment share.
Where Abidjan appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Two cities the atlas reads next to Abidjan — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Abidjan threads below, not counted out of them.
West Africa's inversion: Abidjan numbered its buildings by the metre while Accra generated an address for every square of the country — and both leaned on donor-financed works whose reported completion outran the reality.
African port digitisation from opposite sides: Luanda's concessionaire bought the terminal system, Abidjan's authority built the community one — and both installed street systems with a remote control that only ever switched them on.
Every editorial link from Abidjan's entries into another city, strongest first. Each one is a statement about two projects, not about two cities — the three above are the ones the atlas is willing to make at city level.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/abidjan/ (last verified 2026-08-06). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.