E-government has arrived in Africa but e-projects usually fail. Why is this? What are the causes of failure? Who is responsible? This study from Manchester University assesses the evidence and suggests best practices that may help to close design-reality gaps and thus improve project success rates. This will only happen if they are appropriate to African realities.
E-government in Africa is essentially a concept based on imported designs. There are growing numbers of e-government projects, some of which are contributing to public sector reform and delivering gains of efficiency across a broad agenda. However, this positive picture must be set alongside significant challenges. E-government is only slowly diffusing within Africa because of a lack of readiness.
E-Government has a key role to play in Africa’s current and future development. It can offer critical improvements to the effectiveness of government and probably offers critical future legitimacy for government. E-government delays in Africa as the West pushes ahead will reinforce historical patterns of inequality. The challenge for African nations, therefore, is not if e-government but how e-government can work. This challenge must be met by strategic building of national infrastructure.
Where e-government projects are introduced, they mainly end in either partial or total failure. This is largely due to the gaps that exist between project design and African public sector reality (‘design—reality gaps’). They arise particularly because e-government concepts and designs have their origins in the West, which diifers significantly from African realities:
- E-government solutions designed for one sector or country are being forced directly into a very different reality, causing failure.
- Many of the key players – donor agencies, consultants, IT vendors and African civil servants are complicit in the continuing importation of inappropriate, Western e-government models and systems.
- The gulf between IT professionals and mainstream public servants/politicians is one root cause of design-reality gaps and, hence, of failure in African e-government projects.
- Successful projects are those where key stakeholders cross this gulf by being hybrids: those who understand the technology and the business of government and the role of information in government.
Failure will remain the dominant theme for e-government in Africa unless the above challenges can be addressed, by adoption of identified best practice in design-reality gap closure. The most obvious best practice will be customisation to African realities.
- Leaders of African e-government projects must be competent and confident to demand designs that match their particular situation.
- Stakeholders need to be encouraged to articulate the difference between rational, prescriptive models of what they should be doing and real depictions of what they are actually doing.
- Projects must be reconfigured to limit the extent of change at any given time.
- This can be done by: stretching project time horizons; modularity (supporting one business function at a time) and incrementalism (providing stepped levels of support for business functions).
- In conceptualising e-government in Africa, stereotypes of similarity or difference must be avoided. E-government solutions that work in one country cannot simply be transplanted into others on the continent.
