Ensuring inclusion, equity, and resilience in the era of AI Cities

In order to ensure no one is left behind in the digital economy as smart cities continue to grow across the globe, development efforts must begin by prioritising the diverse needs of marginalised communities.  

According to UNICEF’s Education Specialist and Lead in Malaysia, Azlina Kamal, marginalised communities are not a homogenous group, and includes children, the economically disadvantaged, people with disabilities, seniors, among others. 

Kamal was speaking at the Smart Cities Expo Kuala Lumpur (SCEKL) 2025, which convened in Malaysia for the first time, from September 17 to 19, under the theme AI Cities: Shaping Our Digital Future.  

“Ensuring truly inclusive planning means putting the most marginalised based on their layers and levels of deprivation first.  

“Because whatever works for the marginalised communities will work for the mainstream, but not necessarily the other way around,” she said.  

The SCEKL sessions were organised into various tracks that addressed this topic through wide-ranging themes, including inclusion and digital rights, as well as supporting health and resilience in AI cities. 

Here are some takeaways from the conversations.

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Inclusive by design  

While the SCEKL exhibition hall showcased an impressive display of technology and artificial intelligence (AI) aimed at building smart cities, the real challenge was in bridging the gap.  

What tangible value do these solutions offer to marginalised communities? 

This was a question discussed by speakers at the panel titled No One Left Behind: How Countries Are Empowering Youth, Women & Marginalised Communities in the Digital Economy. 

ASEAN Foundation’s Head of Strategic Planning and Business Development, Mahmudi Yusbi noted that expanding access to these technologies was the only way to close the digital divide and deliver value to marginalised communities.  

The ASEAN Foundation is the implementation arm of the ASEAN Secretariat that translates policy aspirations into impact through community building and programmes.  

“In ASEAN the gaps are quite high still with connectivity and access problems. You can’t compare Singapore with Lao, or Malaysia with Cambodia.  

“To this day, 61 per cent of young people in ASEAN are not taught digital skills in their school, so we need to address this,” said Yusbi.  

Inclusivity, he explained, isn't a matter of simply working for people, but working with them – by ensuring their voices are heard and their needs are addressed in the planning. 

Yusbi shared that the ASEAN Foundation’s AI Ready ASEAN programme aimed to educate and build digital literacy of over five million people in the region to bridge the digital gap.  

“We trained a teacher in Cambodia in Battambag Province. He was then able to teach coding and digital skills to almost 1,000 students with less resource in his community,” he added, highlighting the impact of the programme.

Leveraging tech for targeted interventions 

“When we’re looking at innovation, there’s the impression that we’ll come up with a silver bullet that is going to magically solve things for everybody. But innovation is not that simple,” warned UNICEF’s Kamal.  

“The whole vision of leaving no one behind is more complex. It requires data driven information to achieve more targeted interventions.” 

She highlighted that equity was key to innovation, by focusing on the user needs and circumstances to tailor solutions for a particular problem. 

Applying this concept to education, she highlighted the significant problem of school dropouts.  

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of children who had become disengaged from the school system grew considerably. 

This led to UNICEF adopting an AI-integrated early warning system to track indicators, such as achievement levels, attendance level, distance from school to home, household income among others.  

“With this, we’re able to say whether these children are at a high, medium, or low risk of dropping out. We also have enough data for the system to propose adaptive learning pathways for the child and even employability pathways,” she said. 

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More flexibility needed for the future of education 

Themed Future Learning: AI in Education, Skills & Lifelong Learning, track speakers discussed the need for continuous upskilling and reskilling to address the current industry deficit in digital skills. 

Preparing citizens for AI-powered economies requires aligning education curricula with industry needs.  

“Policy makers must create an enabling environment to incentivise industry players and education institutions to work together, to make the future of learning more dynamic, and ensure that talent reproduced by education institutions are in tandem with industry needs,” said PwC Malaysia’s Workforce Management Partner, Kartina Abdul Latif. 

To keep pace with rapid change, curriculum design needs flexibility, arguing that education must move away from rigid, inflexible frameworks.  

“Rather than having a two-year long diploma or a four-year degree, we could enable more micro-credentialing, stackable upskilling modules, or other formats as part and parcel of the lifelong learning model”, Latif added. 

Japan’s examples of data-driven planning to enhance resilience 

As part of the Health, Happiness & Resilience in AI Cities track, Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, Deputy Minister for International Projects, Kenichi Ogasawara, shared how Japan leveraged tech to address urban challenges. 

He noted that a combination of demographic shifts, including rapidly ageing population, a long-term decline in youth population, low birth rates and increased longevity, “urgently called for innovation”. 

To reduce the time taken to build stakeholder consensus for urban planning, the country developed an open data, urban digital twin called Plateau to build and operate high-precision three-dimensional city models for the whole of Japan.  

This model was designed to be a collaborative tool, used by everyone from citizens to government, researchers and the private sector, to simulate innovative practices to tackle emerging challenges. 

One critical application of the digital twin was enhanced disaster resilience. For example, the model made it possible to simulate various scenarios to optimise evacuation routes with more accuracy. 

“With this platform we hope to predict the future with data. We will overcome the intensifying threats of disasters and population shifts to create inclusive cities where everyone can live safely and with peace of mind,” he concluded. 

Also read:

• People-centredness an imperative for smarter cities, Sept 25, 2025 
• Malaysia wants to be an AI Nation. What’s next to go from vision to impact?, Oct 3, 2025