In the draft political report of the 11th-term Ho Chi Minh City Party Congress for the term of 2020-2025, it was written that building smart city for the city’s sustainable growth so that the city keeps being the country’s leading role in economic development.
To achieve the goal in the draft, HCMC needs to invest heavily in traffic infrastructure and infrastructure for business, telecommunications, education, and technology.
For five past year, despite its efforts to achieve the target, it has not reached as expected because of lack of capital. With its small budget, the city has been carrying out seven breakthrough programs; therefore, it can’t complete all programs as expected.
For the period 2020-2025, the city needs to focus on three key programs including infrastructure connecting with building smart city, administrative reforms relating with government management improvement, and technology growth attaching with manpower training and technology transfer.
For infrastructure development connecting with smart city building, the city should focus on public traffic infrastructure using digital technology in a bid to facilitate city dwellers to travel and transportation of commodities. It will be platform for digital transfer later.
City authority should take heed of flooding, traffic congestions, pollution and digital solutions while carrying out three key programs. When infrastructure is based on digital technology, it will help the city easily attract hi-tech firms, talents, researching companies, investors in the world.
Though the city has had infrastructure planning, many projects have been sluggish for years because of hiccups in disbursement and accounting relating to the central government's management; therefore, the city should continue petitioning to have its own mechanism in carrying out its projects in order to speed up its projects.
So far, HCMC is the center of science and technology and man power training because it is the home of educational facilities and research institutes. It has transferred technologies to other localities. Accordingly, it should have policies to encourage researching companies and establishments to work with businesses in seeking highly-commercial and applicable technologies.
Enterprises should take part in technological researches and training to ensure application of products in reality. If the city wants to achieve its goals, it ought to have mechanisms to promote linkage between companies and training and research institutions.
The city must continue digitalization in administrative reforms to connect state competent agencies – a significant move in smart city building program
To connect companies and schools in training and carrying out scientific , technological researches, the city should encourage to set up private funds for such above-mentioned activities with the contributions of local and international enterprises.
