Twenty tech-savvy youths from the City of Joburg have been selected to head to Hong Kong to gain knowledge that’ll help the City of Gold grow in its quest to become a “smart city”.

The city revealed this recently when it hosted its first Smart City Day at 46 Juta Street in Braamfontein earlier this week, the address of one of four sites that make up the new technology precinct in the area.

The event was organised to showcase the range of different initiatives targeting young people being driven by the City of Joburg.

“We are driving a range of youth-focused projects that are integral to our smart city vision. We are training unemployed youth to become technology-enabled and economically-active, providing unemployed graduates with workplace experience and equipping our youth in all aspects of ICT,” Zolani Matebese, head of broadband for the City, said in a statement.

Other highlights of the day included the showcasing of the city’s COJEDI programme, which trains youths in various ICT fields. We love the name – it stands for City of Joburg Educating Digital Interns – but we like saying COJEDI.

Over 500 youngsters registered for the programme this year, and 480 have now graduated in one of four accredited programmes – Cisco Certified Network Associate; Microsoft Certified System Engineering; Certified Fibre Optics Technician and Web Development and Cloud Computing.

The group of 20 going to Hong Kong, considered to be one of the smartest cities in the world, were selected from COJEDI.

“We look forward to the learning experiences they will share with the City upon their return,” Matebese said.