How many times has your car stopped while you were on your way because you ran out of petrol? How many times you spent more than half an hour on your way because someone else’s car stopped for the same reason?  How full of cars smoke is the air you breathe?

All those questions pushed me to think about a solution, that will lead my city to be smarter.

I started to think about something, which is renewable and available all the time. I thought about many things, but finally I decided to use the air. So my solution is inventing “Windmill-Cars”.

My suggestion is to provide each car with a small windmill on it’s top. The blades will be connected to a drive shaft that turns an electric generator to produce electricity. This will help transforming the air into power, which will also be saved in the generator and will be used whenever there’s a lake of air.                                  

I hope this suggestion will be taken seriously as I think it will help in solving many problems such as traffic, tribe house effect, lake of non-renewable energy and it will help in improving life and making the world smarter.

Asmaa M. Khalil - Cairo, Egypt.

The progress of any society depends on educated, trained manpower, capable of adapting his natural resources and using it the right use which helps to achieve economic and social growth.

In Egypt the problem of illiteracy should deserve more attention in order to address the males and females in different organizations(governmental and civil) and give them the highest priority in national plans with long term policy trying to eradicate illiteracy  and keeping pace with the world in a time of knowledge and global competitions. Quarters of all Egyptians are illiterate, which is a huge number. They discovered that in those 10 years there were 2.3 million school dropouts. In the 2006 statistics, they were counted as illiterates because, according to the research center at the American University in Cairo, 30 percent of dropouts who stay away from school for a long period eventually become illiterate.

We can count that from the problems that cause illiteracy in Egypt is:

  1- Lack of budget directed to the university education and scientific research.

2- The immigration of the Egyptian scientists.

3- The adoption of the Egyptian curriculum on memorization not on the development of creativity among students.

4- The poor quality of education.

All these factors affect education which affects the progress of the society

From my point of view to develop my country to make it smarter, more developed the education should take a greater attention we should:

1- Provide methods that develop scientific thinking and innovation among students.

2- Increase the budget of education especially in higher education.

3- Provide a scientific environment which will help to attract the immigrants’ scientists.

4- The quality of the education also needs to be improved. Arguing that the poor quality of education has led to a significant mismatch between the labor market’s needs.

The importance of education is quite clear. Education is the knowledge of putting one’s potentials to maximum use. One can safely say that a human being is not in the proper sense till he is educated

The importance of education is that only through the attainment of education, man is enabled to receive information from the external world; to acquaint himself the importance of education is that only through the attainment of education, man is enabled to receive information from the external world; to acquaint himself with past history and receive all necessary information regarding the present. Without education, man is as though in a closed room and with education he finds himself in a room with all its windows open towards outside world.

Amir Ibrahim Shafik, Egypt, #gdchallenge

when I started thinking about an idea that makes my city smarter, realized one important thing, without it NO city in the world can be or even start the first step on the way of getting smarter.

I found that in order to create a smarter city, country and planet you have to create a smarter people at the beginning, because this is the main element by which you will make your city smarter. But, the thing is how can you make your people smarter, how can you build a smarter way of thinking in the minds of your citizens!!!! this is what we need to search for.

More surprising is the solution that have proved itself by years and centuries, countries tend to make sure that the fuel they are using for development is the highest quality,  by which their way towards the smarter planet will be guaranteed. And by simple points from my own perspective it’s all about the following sentence: small actions turns into traditions, habits and finally become a life style.

when children see you doing something in a regular basis like throwing off stuff out of your car window, they will never realize that this is something wrong to do, and as you are a role model each and everything you do is taken for granted to be right. And this is the main problem, we are doing things that we got used to do from our parents whom got used to do from theirs and so on, till we reach to the point where every negative action is the right one.

Those actions divided mainly into three categories:

1- Traffic Issue:

Drivers used not to walk in their lane, if the road consists of three lanes you will find four maybe five cars beside each other randomly using their horns as if this will solve the issue.

2- Consumption Issue:

Egyptians used to buy double of the amount they consume, if I know that I’ll need about 500 g/m of apple I will buy one kilo saying what if I needed more. Then we throw away the rest after it have been rotten. And we totally ignore the saying “eat to live, and do not live to eat”.

3- Health Issue:

The main standard two ideas running inside the heads of most Egyptians: when I have time I’ll play sports and as long as I’m not fat I can eat whatever I want to eat. As we got used not to make sports one of our daily nor weekly nor monthly priorities. And more over the negative eating habits like eating a heavy meal late at night right before sleeping and so on. What people do not know how much does it affect your efforts in work and your life in general.

 Those three main categories and others represents the key to a smarter city, which can summarized in one brief quote: “being a ROLE MODEL to the people around you and your children will make the upcoming generation living in a smarter city :)”.

#gdchallenge, Mona Hassan, Cairo