Digital Cairo

Digital Cairo is a joint collaboration of Transport for Cairo, Digital Matatus, and Takween for Integrated Community Development to work together towards implementing a large-scale mapping project of Cairo, the Egyptian capital city. It is supported by Expo Live, an innovation and partnership programme launched by Expo 2020 Dubai. World Expos, which trace their origins back to the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, have always celebrated the latest in innovation and technology.

Expo Live supports the Digital Cairo consortium as part of a cohort of projects and solutions from around the world whose solutions generate social and environmental value and are in line with Expo 2020 Dubai’s subthemes of Opportunity, Mobility and Sustainability. Expo Live will harness the convening power of a World Expo to demonstrate how innovations coming from all places and people can advance the pace of progress and inspire a more inclusive and prosperous future.

The Digital Cairo project set out to map the formal and para-transit systems operating within the Greater Cairo Region ‘GCR’ and aggregate those systems within a single multi-layer network.  The objective was to create a focal point of understanding, assessing and potentially developing urban transport projects and policies for the future. In doing so, it is tackling some of the key challenges surrounding the (1) invisibility of para-transit systems as functioning transit networks used in conjunction with formal modes, (2) the lack of strong data collection at the city scale and the need to (3) localize the process of producing standardized, open and comparable data.

1. All intra-city public transport services originating and ending within six New Desert Cities (NDC): El-Sheikh Zayed City, 6th of October City, New Cairo, El-Obour City, El-Shorouk City, Badr City.
2. All inter-city public transport services originating within an NDC’s and ending in a different NDC.
3. All inter-city public transport services originating within an NDC’s and ending within the boundaries of Cairo.

This strategy was preferred over alternatives as it allowed aiming for a hundred percent coverage of the network of all operating modes of transport within the NDC’s. Over the course of 2018 – 2019 Digital Cairo aims to resume mapping of the rest of the Greater Cairo Region.