Addis Ababa's smart-city story is really a caution about maintenance. Africa's first modern light rail opened in 2015 as a showcase of Chinese-financed infrastructure, with real signalling and crossing-protection engineering built in — but a decade of spare-parts shortages and power cuts has left barely a third of its trains running, a reminder that sophistication only matters if a city can keep the lights on to run it.

The atlas documents 2 projects in Addis Ababa, the earliest dating to 2015: 1 scaled back, 1 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is official (1 entry) — and links its sources.

All 2 projects in Addis Ababa

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

Outcome: 1 ongoing · 1 scaled back — Evidence: 1 official · 1 media

Deeper reads

Where Addis Ababa appears in the atlas's own analysis.

Compare with other cities

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• 🇪🇸 Barcelona: ApparkB Regulated Parking Payment & Prediction Both replaced paper parking with an app; Barcelona folded ApparkB into Smou, Addis Ababa first locked payments to one state bank.
• 🇵🇭 Manila: No-Contact Apprehension Policy Camera Enforcement Digitised enforcement, contested money split: Manila's contractor kept 60-70% of fines; Addis put parking unions on percentage deals.

Official strategy and sources

📎 Cite this city

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/addis-ababa/ (last verified 2026-08-07). Data: CC BY 4.0.

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

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