1001 Smart Cities
Phnom Penh
Mao Piseth, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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Phnom Penh

Country
Cambodia
Population
2.4M
Projects
2
First project
1993
Best evidence
Independent
Last verified
17 August 2026

🤖 AI-generated city profile, summarising the source-checked entries below — how this works

Phnom Penh's place in this atlas rests on the most cited utility turnaround in the developing world: between 1993 and 2008 its water authority cut losses from 72% to 6% — with meters and enforced bills, not sensors — and won the 2010 Stockholm Industry Water Award for it. Nearly everything instrumented since has arrived as a donor project: JICA rebuilt the traffic signals, restarted the city buses and fitted them with GPS for an official tracking app, while a China-backed programme handed the interior ministry an AI camera network in 2026. The honest reading of Cambodia's capital is a city whose strongest system predates the smart-city vocabulary entirely.

The atlas documents 2 projects in Phnom Penh, the earliest dating to 1993: 1 with a documented success, 1 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is independent (1 entry) — and links its sources.

All 2 projects in Phnom Penh

✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.

📡 PPWSA: Metering Out a 72% Water Loss 📊 Independent since 1993 · Live → 🚲 City Bus GPS Fleet Tracking & Official App 🏛️ Official since 2019 · Live →

Outcome: 1 succeeded · 1 ongoing — Evidence: 1 independent · 1 official

Deeper reads

Where Phnom Penh appears in the atlas's own analysis.

🏆 1 in the what-worked record🧾 Passport: PPWSA🧾 Passport: City Bus GPS Fleet Tracking & Official App

Compare with other cities

🇰🇪 Nairobi Digital Matatus Open Mapping Framework Two answers to unmapped buses: Nairobi charted informal routes once; Phnom Penh tracks a small formal fleet live. 🇿🇦 Johannesburg Johannesburg Water: Pressure Control and Night-Flow Telemetry Against 46% Losses The inverse outcome on the same axis: Joburg's losses sit above 45% under audit — Phnom Penh cut 72% to single digits on meters. 🇹🇷 Istanbul ISKI Centralized SCADA Water Balancing Strategy Istanbul instruments the network (SCADA/DMA, 22.3% to 18.6%); Phnom Penh reached single digits on customer meters first. 🇮🇳 New Delhi Open Transit Data Portal & Live Bus Feeds Delhi opened its bus data and the GPS went dark; Phnom Penh's app tracks live buses that sit in ordinary traffic.
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Official strategy and sources

↗ Phnom Penh Capital AdministrationThe organization driving the city's smart-city work.
📎 Cite this city

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/phnom-penh/ (last verified 2026-08-17). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

🔔 Follow changes to Phnom Penh’s entries (RSS)