The Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 programme defines a set of ambitious goals and targets that aim to improve the quality of life of citizens, diversity its economy, increase employment, enhance government effectiveness, enable social responsibility and more. Accordingly, the City of Riyadh has begun to leverage ICTs in order to realize the visions set in the 2030 programme. In the early 2019, the city decided to partner with U4SSC in piloting the Key Performance Indicators for Smart Sustainable Cities. The objectives of this project were two-folded. First, it is to assess the impacts of ICTs in the city. And second, it is to measure its progress in reaching the SDGs. The U4SSC KPIs measure the role of ICTs in the three key dimensions of a city; environment; economic; and society and culture. Each indicator is uniquely connected to one or multiple SDG targets, allowing the city to determine which targets it has or has not achieved.

The U4SSC KPIs are powerful benchmarking tools that have allowed the city planners to analyze the ways in which ICTs have improved the city according to the parameters set in the 2030 Agenda. The results are comparable and measurable data that have assisted Riyadh in adjusting its priorities and informed the city's policymakers to make better environmental, economic and sustainability decisions.

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• Saudi Arabia

• Youth
• Older persons
• Women
• People with disabilities
• The unemployed
• The poor
• Remote and rural communities
• City inhabitants

The KPIs are designed to be flexible and replicable. Every city can use the U4SSC KPIs to evaluate their smart initiatives and progress in reaching the SDGs regardless of their geographic location or capacity. The KPIs are divided into two set of indicators; the core indicators; and the advanced indicators. Cities only need to report the core indicators in order to obtain a holistic view on its smart progress. The advanced indicators complement the core indicators but do not constitute as an integral part of the assessment. The high replicability of the U4SSC KPIs is also proven by the fact that over 100 cities worldwide, including Singapore, Moscow, Valencia, have already partnered with the U4SSC in implementing these indicators.

The implementation of the U4SSC is both operationally and environmentally sustainable as it involves only the collection of data with minimal resource usage.

The U4SSC KPIs project promotes WSIS values in Riyadh by providing a standardized approach in assessing the impacts of ICTs in the city as well as accelerating the progress of the SDGs. This project is the catalyst that has allowed the city government of Riyadh continues to invest in digital technologies to realize the 2030 Visions, making them more efficient, sustainable, and accessible, all of which are in line with the principles and visions of the WSIS forum.