African governments are spending billions of dollars on the “smart” surveillance of public spaces using technology from China, a new report found.
More than $2 billion has been spent on facial recognition and car-tracking technologies in 11 countries on the continent — including Kenya, Nigeria, and Rwanda — according to research from the UK-based Institute of Development Studies.
It found that Nigeria alone has spent more than $470 million on AI-enabled facial recognition and automatic car number plate recognition, making it Africa’s largest buyer of smart city surveillance technologies.
Typically, a Chinese ‘safe city’ surveillance package is financed by soft loans, according to researchers. For example, a loan of $250 million from China Eximbank might be tied to the purchase of surveillance cameras from Hikvision and a command and control center built and serviced by Huawei or ZTE.
