e-Governance in Africa
From Theory to Action

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e-Governance in Africa
From Theory to Action

A Handbook on ICTs for Local Governance

Gianluca C. Misuraca

Copyright © 2007 International Development Research Centre (IDRC)
First Printing 2007

Jointly Published by
AFRICA WORLD PRESS
P.O. Box 1892, Trenton, New Jersey 08607
awprsp@verizon.net/www.africaworldpressbooks.com

and the
International Development Research Centre
PO Box 8500, Ottawa, ON Canada KIG 3149
info@idrc/www.idrc.ca
ISBN (e-book) 978-1-55250-369-0

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Book and cover design: Saverance Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Misuraca, Gianluca.
 E-Governance in Africa, from theory to action: a handbook on ICTs for local
governance / by Gianluca Misuraca; with foreword by Joseph O. Okpaku.
   p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.
 ISBN 1-59221-578-5 (hard cover) -- ISBN 1-59221-579-3 (pbk.)
 1. Internet in public administration--Africa. 2. Information technology--Africa. I. Title.

JQ1875.A55A86 2007
352.3'802854678--dc22

                                                                                     2007012518

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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FOREWORD
by Joseph O. Okpaku, Sr., Ph.D.

As is true of all new ideas and fields of human engagement, e-government (along with its collateral subject of e-governance) is knee-deep in the challenge of definitions as competing intellectuals, specialists and practitioners seek to clarify the many concepts and issues that define the concept, or to prevail in the choices of preferred definitions. On top of the list of concepts in transition, the dominant definitions of which are up for grabs, are: electronic Government or e-government, and its contradistinction with e-governance; e-Administration; the plethora of subsidiary (even if older) concepts such as e-Education, e-Health e-Voting and more, and overall, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) Development versus ICTs for Development.

In the process of seeking permanent space in the dual world of technology and governance, a process driven as much by equipment, applications and services vendors as by administrators, fresh opportunities are being created daily for the deployment of the tools of Information and Communication Technologies and the infrastructure that provides the platform on which they perform. Significantly, the systemic arena for e-government has advanced from global and regional, to in-country national, state, provincial, county and local levels of government. Not surprisingly, the field has also panned out to infuse itself with the by now predictable dichotomies of ICTs and e-government in industrialized countries versus in developing countries, for the rich versus the poor, the haves and the have-nots. An inevitable by-product of this process is e-government in Africa as a sub-sector, and here, many questions have been raised and attempts made to answer them. Already, there are more questions than the field can provide answers for, which is as it should be in a dynamic process that is driven by the search for answers to ever emerging questions, and the innovation and creativity that result.

In such an environment, e-governance in Africa, From Theory to Action: A Handbook on ICTs for Local Governance by Gianluca Carlo Misuraca, is a timely and significant effort to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the theme of e-governance in Africa, its many challenges and opportunities, and the state and dynamics of the fast evolving situation on the ground. Together with the handful of similar works before it, this book offers a very valuable synopsis of the scholarship to date on the subject, especially as it seeks to provide the author's own definitions of key concepts in e-government and e-governance, and his interpretations of those of other scholars.

e-governance in Africa, From Theory to Action is presented in three parts: In Part I, "Conceptual Framework: Towards a Multi-dimensional e-governance", the author diligently and successfully seeks to provide a summary of the key positions in the debate on the theoretical framework for examining the real or potential (or, for that matter, the absence of) impact of the deployment of Information and Communication Technologies and their applications for the administration of governance, otherwise, e-governance. He attempts to track the conceptual migration from e-government to e-governance, seeking to demonstrate a distinction between the two. In the process, Misuraca presents his own evolution of the conceptualisation of e-governance, and offers what he calls a "working definition" of e-governance as:

The use of ICTs, and especially of the Internet, to adopt a new conception and attitude of governing and managing where participation and efficiency are required of all partners linked in a network.

He goes on to call e-governance "a new way of coordinating, planning, formulating and implementing decisions and operations related to governance problems, using ICTs as a medium of communication and partnership-development," or simply, " Governance with and of ICTs".

Misuraca argues forcefully about the benefits of e-governance, specifically for local government (what the trade calls Local e-government or e-Local Governance), and especially in Africa. He postulates that this process can enable local governments to "re-invent" themselves, and maintains that a good deal of the promise of democratic governance can be more readily accomplished through the embodiment of networked electronic facilities in local government administration.

These claims are by no means self-evident or universally accepted. There are those who argue equally coherently that the cost of migrating local governance (and perhaps all government administration) to an e-governance platform in a context of competing demands of abject financial resources cannot be justified. I for one also maintain that the unmitigated deployment of e-governance can inadvertently serve to undermine direct contact between the people and those who govern them, a crucial, fundamental and non-negotiable pre-requisite of good, representative, responsive and responsible governance. If nothing else, the efficacy of the claims of the de facto incontrovertible benefits of e-governance is clearly yet to be proven, given the still questionable success of e-governance even in materially much richer regions of the world. In common parlance, the jury is still out on this subject. But the presentation of much of the argument on the subject by Gianluca Misuraca is very informative and most useful in providing support or fodder for either side of the argument.

Which is what makes Part Two of the book, "Case Studies on ICTs for Local Governance", a summary of four case studies in Africa, and the core of this book, most relevant. The selection of the locale of the case studies, with one in French-speaking West Africa (Senegal), one in English-speaking West Africa (Ghana), one in East Africa (Uganda), and one in southern Africa (Cape Town, South Africa), attempts to provide a representative continental sampling. Each case study differs significantly from the other, providing a broad spectrum of experience even if, for the same reason, this limits the authority or justification to draw cross-cutting conclusions from such disparate experiments.

The Senegal Case, is a study of the impact of ICTs on the decentralization of government based exclusively on a review of the Senegal ACACIA Strategy (SAS), which is a project of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada, and which was begun in 1996. The author reviews various phases of this project, and concludes that despite initial gains, after a decade of effort, there is no significant impact of the introduction of electronic resources on the decentralization of governance in Senegal. The reasons for this are perhaps as important as the outcome, perhaps significantly more so. Misuraca identifies a good number of questions that need to be answered in seeking to deploy ICTs for the decentralization of government and empowering local administrations.

The Ghana Study, which examines ICTs and Traditional Governance, reviews a number of projects that seek to use Information and Communication Technologies to enhance the effectiveness of governance by traditional chiefs and their collaboration and coordination with the central (elected) government. These include the locally-developed ICTs for Accelerated Development (ICT4AD) strategy, the Chieftaincy, Governance and Development project developed by the Institute of African Studies at Ghana's premier tertiary institution, the University of Legon, and sponsored by the Ford Foundation, and in particular the Governance, Culture and Development project, funded by the Open Society Initiative of West Africa (OSIWA).

This case study is a particularly complex one to seek to draw conclusions from because the core tension in the experiments involved in the projects is not so much e-governance as it is the dynamics between traditional governance and authority as represented by traditional chiefs (who remain very powerful in Ghana) and the contemporary state governance as led by elected officials. The struggle for power between traditional rulers and elected officials was a major challenge at Ghana's Independence in 1956 as it was in that of Nigeria (1960) and other West African states in which traditional chiefs once represented the prime authority of governance. Seeking to ascribe kudos for a greater working relationship between the two to the use of ICTs risks being far-fetched. Nonetheless, Misuraca offers some sound observations, including, for example, that traditional leaders need to acquire a working knowledge of modern instruments of public administration while securing the benefits of long-standing trust by the people that is inherent in chieftaincy.

The Ugandan case study is of the District Administrative Network Programme (DistrictNet). DistrictNet came out of the Roundtable Workshop on "ICTs for Rural Development" held by the Government of Uganda in March 2001 as a pilot project in four districts of the country's administrative system. Sponsored partly by the International Institute for Communication Development (IICD) and the Department for International Development (DFID) of the government of the United Kingdom, DistrictNet's purpose was to promote the establishment of facilities and capacities for adopting data management and the use of electronic communication to enhance the delivery of administrative services. Misuraca highlights the achievements of this programme and its promise as it migrates from pilots to nationwide implementation.

He, however, identifies several challenges that will need to be carefully managed in order for this transition to be successful.

In the last case study, the author reviews the extensive efforts made by the City of Cape Town in South Africa, to create a "Smart City" through a series of projects, some internally driven, other externally, but all aimed at streamlining the administration of government services while promoting business. He provides good descriptions of the various projects and the results that have emerged from the effort. He concludes that the class (and, in South Africa, therefore, racial) distinctions that are part of the social fabric remain essentially unaltered despite the ICTs programmes, mainly because of the imbalance in the relative ability of people and enterprises to pay for the cost of access and service.

In Part III, "Conclusions and Way Forward", Gianluca Misuraca provides his own conclusions from the case studies and his views on the overall challenges of the use of ICTs for local governance. Amongst them are that: no one strategy fits all; local content is important; engaging large numbers of the focus population is difficult but important; the high cost of ICTs equipment, applications and services remains a deterrent to the adoption or successful implementation of Local e-government programmes; and local conditions must be considered rather than seeking to import external models wholesale.

The final chapter in this section, "One Way Forward: LOG-IN Africa", presents the Local Governance and ICTs Research Network which "Project Idea" was formulated by the author himself. LOG-IN Africa is funded to the tune of 1.5 million Canadian dollars by IDRC and was successfully established under the leadership of Gianluca Misuraca as Project Leader and Research Network Coordinator in 2006.

Finally, the Annex, "Review of Key Experiences of ICTs Impacting on Governance in Africa", serve as very useful research tools as much for the student and scholar, as for the practitioner and the administrator.

This book is by no means a comprehensive or exhaustive study of e-governance in Africa, but a case study of selected experiments on e-governance in local government in Africa. This notwithstanding, the author is to be congratulated for what he has addressed, without being held responsible for what he has not. To get the most out of this book, the reader might wish to focus a bit more on what it covers and offers, and the value of the conclusions that the author has extrapolated from these case studies (even as focus points for debate) rather than on what it has not but might have offered or covered. This is particularly important because the permutation of what could be addressed is so vast that no one book, not even in electronic form, can be fully comprehensive and yet comprehensible. This is why the author proscribed the scope of the work in the subtitle of the book, as a handbook. What it does do that is important, is that it provides a valuable compendium of the debate on the subject.

A major obstacle to gaining useful and meaningful value from the output of research on matters concerning Africa, derives in serious part from the nature of their sponsorship. Unfortunately, more often than is acceptable or desirable, many such research tend to be advocacy and agenda-driven, and the footprints of such a pedigree tend to be strewn all over the reports and their recommendations. These what one might call "sponsor imprints" vary from subtle suggestions to heavy-handed pre-determined "institution self-serving" conclusions which often fly in the face of evidence, and often of common sense. This often not only subjects the results of the studies to what one might call "benign notice", but more often than not leads to the corresponding benign neglect of their recommendations, and to their failure if implemented.

In this regard, IDRC, especially through its ACACIA initiative, has had an illustrious and consistent track record of promoting ICTs in Africa for a long time. This study, sponsored by it, inevitably would seek to provide justification (and justifiable reinforcement) for the efforts and investment. Significantly, to the credit of both the author and to IDRC, Misuraca has delineated numerous challenges, obstacles and even failures in the once presumed self-evident and incontrovertible benefits of ICTs for accelerating governance and overall development, especially in Africa. He may not have covered the reasons for this shortfall in efficacy. But one might suggest that they possibly lie, at least in part, elsewhere in global strategic, intellectual, cultural and policy assumptions that are eminently questionable, even though loud in their advocacy, and compelling in the power behind them. But providing a comprehensive explanation for such shortfalls may not belong to the purview and context of this book.

e-governance in Africa, From Theory to Action: A Handbook on ICTs for Local Governance is a important contribution to the literature on the subject of e-governance in general, and e-governance in Africa in particular, as well as of ICTs and Development in Africa.

This volume reflects Gianluca Misuraca's vast knowledge of the field, including his practical experience while working for UN-DESA on secondment to the Tangier-based African Training and Research Centre in Administration for Development (CAFRAD), domicile of the e-Africa Initiative of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) of the African Union. Misuraca himself originally formulated the e-Africa Initiative on behalf of CAFRAD and UN-DESA in 2002.

I highly recommend it, as a significant work at an important phase in a scholarship process that is still in its puberty, with much debate and maturation, and the corresponding adjustment in the conceptual framework, yet to come.

Joseph O. Okpaku, Sr., PhD
President and CEO
Telecom Africa International Corporation
New Rochelle, N. Y. USA

Dr. Joseph O. Okpaku, Sr., President and CEO of Telecom Africa International Corporation, is a globally renowned expert in teleCommunication, Information and Communication Technologies, Strategic Development and Governance. He has lectured and is extensively published worldwide on the subject of ICTs, Governance and Development, including eGovernment for Results: A Programme Document for the Implementation of the Tangier Plan of Action for the e-Africa Initiative on Good Governance; Creating a Desirable 21st Century Africa: The Role of Leadership and Governance; Knowledge and the Translucency of Government: The Opportunities and Challenges of eGovernment for Strategic Development; SMART e-GOVERNMENT---Adopting Information and Communication Technologies to Enhance Strategic Development Without Undermining Fundamental Human Priorities, and Information and Communication Technologies for African Development: An Assessment of Progress and Challenges Ahead (ed.).

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PREFACE

"...let us resolve to bridge the Digital Divide between countries,
between rural and urban areas, between educated and
illiterate populations, and between men and women. And let
us act urgently so that all the world's people can benefit from
the potential of the ICT revolution...."

—U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan
2002 "World Telecommunication Day"

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are bringing about major changes in the way in which local and regional authorities operate, interact and communicate internally or with other administrations, enterprises and citizens. As the closest level of government to the citizen and the main providers of public services, local and regional authorities are in the front line in the development of e-government and e-governance initiative.

e-government can be defined in many ways, but this work identifies it as the composite trend of governments at all level, mainly through their operational arm, the administration and, subsidiarily through the access of citizens to public affairs, aimed at promoting 1) a better and more efficient administration, 2) more effective inter-administration and administration-enterprise relationships and 3) user-empowering servicing and more transparent access of citizens to political decision-making.

e-governance is instead generally referred to as the capacity of ICTs to harness changes, looking not only at the increasing use of ICTs as a technological tool for delivering services online and improving the efficiency of administrations, but as a new paradigm for opening up government services to citizens, thereby increasing transparency and participation, and making government more responsive and centred upon its citizens' needs.

But this is a limited definition of the potential of e-governance, in fact, the conceptualisation of e-governance that I propose in this work is that e-governance concerns a rapidly evolving multi-dimensional, multi-actor, multi-level and inter-sectoral area of application, influenced not only by the ICT-revolution, but mainly by globalisation, international economic competition and state transformation. It also takes place in a very specific environment and contextual atmosphere about which we must understand and learn, in order to best guide the process. This overall change can be identified as manifold, although producing a composed impact on our lifestyle, level of wealth and relationships, inter-regionally and inter-nationally speaking.

In this respect, exchanges of experiences can provide a valuable tool in helping local and regional authorities to rise to the challenge and meet the expectations and needs of citizens in the digital era. This does not involve imposing a model, especially imported from the North to the South, but instead, pooling the wealth of knowledge that we have together and tapping this resource through the creation of a platform for the dissemination of practices and the localisation of solutions to promote regional development and good local governance.

However, as technology changes rapidly, so does the study of ICT-related issues. This is especially true with regard to a subject such as e-governance, that is still in its infancy, with a limited literature, no demonstrated results from applied research and which is evolutionary by definition.

Therefore, the findings and conclusions of this work should be considered both as a starting point and as a basis for further research and analysis.

This is also because from the time I started investigating in the area of e-governance to the publication of this work, there has been an emerging interest in the subject and, at the same time, some first applications of the hypothesis of the positive impact of ICTs on governance are also showing their limitations.

My own observations of the issues related to ICTs and governance have been subject to evolution. In fact, this research is the result of my "learning journey" on e-governance in Africa, started actually when, from e-Europe I went to e-Africa. It began in 2002 when I was working with the United Nations, and it was enriched by the experience gained at the Executive Master in e-governance at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), of which I am now the Managing Director, after being a "pioneer" participant in its first edition in 2005.

During this period I have been looking at the interrelation between ICTs and governance, and it is now clear to me that, as one of the most recognised and appreciated scholars in this field, and a pioneer in the area, Prof Claudio Ciborra, already mentioned in his inaugural lecture at the London School of Economics in October 2002, "New approaches are desperately needed".

It is with this recommendation in mind that I am also looking at the relationship of ICTs and Governance, not only from a technological point of view, but mainly as the framework in which institutional redesign can take place.

I wish you pleasant reading.

Gianluca C. Misuraca

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

During my previous and current working experience I learned a lot from Africa and Africa changed my life... As happened to many before me, and will still happen after, Africa conquered me and many friends consider myself "African by adoption"....

I wish therefore to thank all the people I met in my "learning journey", and especially during my many travels across Africa.

In particular, I wish to thank Prof Tijjani Muhammad Bande, former Director General of the African Training and Research Centre in Administration for Development (CAFRAD), where I spent three unforgettable years, and all CAFRAD's "family" and all other "African" colleagues, as well as Mr. Guido Bertucci, Director of the Division for Public Administration and Development Management of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), and Ms Haiyan Qian, Chief of UNPAN, my supervisors during the two years I spent as Associate Expert serving the UN.

I also wish to thank Prof Matthias Finger and especially my friend Dr Pierre Rossel of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) for their mentoring during my Executive Master first and, afterward, as colleagues in the implementation of the Master itself, and for the common development of a new conceptualisation of e-governance as well as the establishment of a platform for global knowledge dissemination.

I am grateful to Prof. Mike Martin and his wife Bernadette for reviewing my text, and for most valuable comments and, of course, a special thanks go to Jo Okpaku, that accepted to write the foreword of the book. It enriches enormously my work, and I am delighted to be associated with one of the most relevant scholar on ICTs for Development in Africa.

Of course, I also need to thank "my government", Souad, and all my family for the patience and the support they provided me during my professional and research activities.

Last but not least, I wish to thank the International development Research Centre (IDRC) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) which gave me the opportunity to conduct this research and supported me throughout its execution, and allowed me to travel again,...from e-Africa to... LOG-IN Africa, the Research Network on Local Governance and ICTs for Africa, approved for funding by IDRC and executed by CAFRAD, established under my leadership, in 2006.

INTRODUCTION

The advent of the Information Society is creating unprecedented conditions for bridging the digital divide through supporting government operations to strengthen the establishment of efficient, effective and transparent governance systems. Electronic tools can significantly improve the services and information flows from administrations to their constituencies. Communication among administrations and citizens and businesses can be enhanced and, at the same time, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) offer unique opportunities for the re-use and exploitation of public sector information within the emerging digital economy. Bringing out this potential will create vast economic opportunities for developing countries1. However, there are different aspects and configurations of the Digital Divide: Infrastructural, Information, Knowledge, Intellectual, Human Resource Capacity, Cultural, Content2. Therefore, the Digital Opportunity also presents a "divide" among developed and developing countries. This needs different actions in different contexts and a holistic approach to solve, in an integrated manner, the various gaps existing in developing countries and, in particular, Africa.

The centrality and importance of strengthening the political and administrative frameworks in African countries is commonly recognised. In the context of development, improved governance has several implications. In particular, however, it facilitates the design and pursuit of a comprehensive national strategy of development. It ensures capacity, reliability and integrity of the core institutions of the modern state. It implies improving the ability of government to carry out governmental policies and functions, including the management of implementation mechanisms. It means accountability for actions and transparency in decision-making and also signifies the opportunity for people to participate openly in the democratic process. Improved governance requires an effective, efficient and responsive public administration system3.

In the light of the above, and within the framework of enhancing governance in Africa, there's a clear recognition of challenges and opportunities particularly relating to the development of a widespread «Knowledge-based Society» to be created using e-governance as a tool. As underlined by the United Nations Development Programme - Human Development Report 2001 "Making New Technologies Work for Human Development", "technology networks are transforming the traditional map of development, expanding people's horizons and creating the potential to realise in a decade progress that required generations in the past"4. There is no doubt that the need for all-round improvement of performance is a very urgent one for African governments and that ICTs are valuable in decision making, planning and management support in all sectors of the economy5. The Information Society is in fact already being overcome by the "Network Age", that is changing how technologies are created and diffused. But gaps among rich and poor countries and risks of mismanagement of the enormous opportunities and power given by ICTs have to be carefully taken into consideration.

The international debate and several United Nations documents, such as the Millennium Declaration and the Monterrey Consensus, have highlighted the centrality and importance of good governance for sustainable development. Sound economic policies, solid democratic institutions responsive to the needs of the people and improved infrastructure are understood as being the basis for sustained economic growth, poverty reduction and employment creation.

ICTs provide a powerful tool in support of development strategies and the establishment of efficient and effective governance systems. Electronic tools can significantly improve service delivery, transparency and accountability and two-way communications between administrations and their constituencies.

Contexts and institutional frameworks within African countries are changing rapidly and policymakers and private and public telecommunications service providers have introduced reforms. Reforming countries are reaping the benefits through improved infrastructure, increased applications and better accessibility and affordability of ICTs equipment and services. However, one of the major challenges confronting Africa is to develop the capacity, strategies, and mechanisms necessary to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by ICTs especially at the local level.

The Fifth African Governance Forum (2002) and the Declaration of the World Summit of Cities and Local Authorities on the Information Society (Lyon, 5 December 2003), both identified development at the local level as the key to good governance including through the use of ICTs. Notably, the Digital Solidarity Fund, the new financial mechanism officially established and funded as a follow-up to the first phase of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), has the specific aim of supporting projects and activities in the area of ICTs for local governance in developing countries. However, despite the recognition of its importance little empirical evidence exists, especially in Africa, on the effects of ICTs on local governance.

Decentralisation and locally controlled administration are increasingly identified as basic components of democratic governance and provide an enabling environment in which decision making and service delivery can be brought closer to the people, especially the poor and the marginalised. Community participation in decision making, planning, implementation and monitoring and backed by appropriate institutions and resources; along with effective decentralisation can, through ensuring greater accountability, responsiveness and participation, result in local services that are more efficient, equitable, sustainable and cost-effective.6

The integration of ICTs in these processes can greatly enhance the delivery of public services to all citizens and thus, the overall objective of improving the performance of governance systems at all levels, as well as increase the democratic governance framework of the society at large.

But the potential for e-governance in developing countries remains largely unexploited,7 perhaps because of the difficulty in achieving the revised organisational structures and skills; the degree of decentralisation of decision making;8 new forms of leadership; transformation toward public-private partnerships; and the effective involvement of stakeholders that is required.9 Moreover, local governance is in general given little attention within national e-governance policies and strategies.

However, the broad assumptions that decentralisation policies can influence good local governance and that the use of ICTs can greatly increase this influence have yet to be proven. To date there is little empirical evidence of the "multi-dimensional" effects of ICTs on local governance, which can in turn inform national e-governance policies. While, there are some examples of linkages between ICTs and local governments, the causal connection between ICTs and innovation in local governance for socio-economic development is little understood. Also, recognition of the potential of ICTs for local governance comes from a few successful pilot applications around the world. Attempts are currently underway to critically evaluate some of these projects so that the real extent of their impact can be understood and the factors inhibiting that impact can be identified. However, there is no common assessment framework from which lessons can be drawn in examining the link between ICTs and good local governance which is defined as "the exercise of economic, political, and administrative authority to better manage the affairs of a locale".10

With this research I intended to initiate the move away from anecdotal analysis of strengthening local governance with ICTs, towards a more rigorous, evidential and outcomes-based analysis of developing trends and implementation of ICTs in local governance and so develop the basis for a Research Agenda on ICTs for Local Governance in Africa.

In fact, drawing on an "institutionalist" framework, on the one hand I have started to investigate how ICTs affect policy outcomes within a given institutional setting and, on the other hand, what are the key drivers or factors of success in implementing strategies and programmes that include integrating ICTs at local governance level.

The theoretical framework underpinning the practical work assumes not only a direct intervening effect of ICTs on policy outcomes, but furthermore a possible indirect effect of ICTs on the institutional settings themselves.

The analysis focusses on four selected projects being implemented in Africa, as case studies, to start creating an environment of lessons to be learned from each other and to inform about the factors of success in relation to enhancing governance and reinforcing democracy using ICTs.

The preparation of the case studies is based upon "field-missions" undertaken within the framework of the Acacia & Connectivity Africa Dissemination Activities of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and on behalf of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), in preparation of the Second Phase of the World Summit on Information Society – WSIS-II (Tunis 2005), as well as to support the development of a broader Research Network Activity to be initiated and funded by IDRC and executed through the African Training and Research Centre in Administration for Development (CAFRAD) as a follow-up to the WSIS-II (Tunis, November 2005).

The case studies, identified following the decisions of the "Partnership for ICTs in Africa" (PICTA) meeting (Tunis, 2003), where an assessment of tools for local government, compiling stories on different PICTA member partners' experiences in this area, has been indicated as a priority action, are the following:

1. The role of ICTs in Decentralisation Policy in Senegal;

2. ICTs and Traditional Governance in Ghana;

3. The District Administrative Network Programme in Uganda;

4. The Cape Town's "Smart City" Strategy in South Africa.

By investigating the relationships between ICTs and local governance, my research was intended to provide empirical evidence of the dynamics, outcomes and implications for policy and practice of the integration of ICTs in local governance systems in Africa. Also, key drivers for effective integration of ICTs into local governance systems have been identified and discussed, based on concrete examples and discussing them within the local context of effective implementation.

Conclusions, more than a definitive set of recommendations for implementation of ICTs at the local level should be seen as some lessons learned from experience, and the starting point of further research in the emerging area of e-Local governance, and e-governance in general.

Notes

1. Misuraca Gianluca, "e-Africa initiative for good governance: building e-governance capacity in Africa", Paper presented to the International Conference on e-government, SITEXPO, Casablanca, Morocco, 18-21 February 2004.

2. Okpaku Joseph, Ownership of Problems, Intellectual Property and the Digital Divide: The Enabling Challenge of Solutions - An address to the WIPO Second International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Intellectual Property, Geneva, September, 2001.

3. UNDESA, Economic Governance: Guidelines for Effective Financial Management, New York, 2000.

4. UNDP, Human Development Report, 2001, www.undp.org

5. e-Africa 2002: Building e-governance capacity in African countries, Tangier, 2002, Project Proposal, prepared by Gianluca Misuraca on behalf of the African Training and Research Centre in Administration for Development, CAFRAD.

6. Report of the Workshop on Poverty Alleviation and Decentralization for Ten West African countries, organized jointly by UNDESA and the Government of Senegal, Dakar, July, 2003.

7. D.V. Ndou, "e-government for Developing Countries: Opportunities and Challenges", The Electronic Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries, 18,1,1-24, 2004.

8. Dr. A. Aliyu, "Nigerian Experience of Decentralization as a Means to Improve Governance and How It Contributes to Combating Poverty", 2003.

9. Fifth African Governance Forum (AGFV), "Local Governance for Poverty Reduction in Africa", Maputo, Mozambique, 23-25 May 2002.

10. LOG-IN Africa Project Proposal, Gianluca Misuraca on behalf of CAFRAD for IDRC, November 2005.

PART I
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK:
TOWARDS AMULTI-DIMENSIONAL E-GOVERNANCE

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1
THE POTENTIAL OF ICTS FOR GOOD GOVERNANCE: BASIC CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS

Today's world is more and more referred to as being "networked" due to the advancement of ICTs but also because of the growing phenomenon of the involvement of non-state or non-governmental actors into policy-making, either in a consultative way or through the development of new participatory approaches, often enabled or enhanced by the use of ICTs.

This is dispersing State power into autonomous local governance systems, while the industrial revolution in the past centralized it. The opportunity of using ICTs for communicating on a global scale has added new dimensions to possibilities for pursuing national, regional and local development; that is where economic and social impacts can be more valuable to the administration users and the citizens.

Recognising the importance of information for democratic and civic life, in principle, it is required to increase knowledge and information capacities to operate in a context where institutions and infrastructure are needed to facilitate the flow of information, its availability and access. Some indicates in a straightforward positive way that "Information and knowledge are closely intertwined: to produce information, a knowledgeable agent processes new findings and data, acceptable to society, and the resulting commodity is the increase of knowledge through improvement of access". In this way, "The increment in knowledge reduces uncertainty with regard to the organisation of economic and social activities, providing the capacity to effectively use available information and reach informed decisions"1.

However, as a matter of fact, information is not knowledge neither competence. Information access and sharing, as well as expert data handling, necessitate a lot of knowledge. Information is not the first stage towards knowledge, neither the pre-condition of it. Often it is quite the opposite. Similarly, the increase of participation in the usage of ICTs is no automatic and linear step towards a deep, effective, sustainable or democratic evidence. On the contrary, one has to stress that to carry out a collective learning of some significance through ICTs, more horizontal processes, empowerment and trial and error linked with experience sharing must somehow take place "upstream" or at least considered quite early in an ICT-based project to constitute a democratic enhancement chance.

In this context, the relations between ICTs and governance are multiple. Governance supported by the development of ICTs can have more powerful information transmission, stimulate debate and participation and, at the same time, the establishment of information systems and knowledge management tools can facilitate governmental processes. However, it should be underlined that, when discussing integration of ICTs in administration, the focus is in the promotion of governance using ICTs as a tool, rather than the ICTs being an end in themselves2.

To this extent, it is necessary to identify and to try to define the basic concepts we are dealing with, from Government to Governance, at central and local level, and including the potential role of the ICTs as a tool for good governance as well as giving a perspective on how ICTs can enhance citizens' participation.

In fact, there are many definitions and views of the same concept, and interpretations are so varied and sometimes conflicting that makes this task difficult and could generate controversial conclusions. In this context, with particular regard to the use of ICTs in public administration, some assert that "trying to establish a single definition for such complex and diverse issues and challenges may be unworkable at best and unhelpful at worst"3.

Therefore, what I try to do here is to discuss basic concepts and present some commonly recognised definitions aiming at providing a contribution to the establishment of a common understanding on what we are talking about, in order to build a shared framework within which an operational dialogue among different actors and stakeholders, with different backgrounds, viewpoints, interests and objectives, can work together. This is done utilising international literature and especially recent background papers produced within the context of the Global Forum on Re-inventing Government and the UN World Public Sector Reports4.

First of all, everyone thinks they know what a government is, but its "simple" definition given by the United Nations, introduces other concepts that are not always effectively considered by all governments.

In its broadest sense, government refers to a body that has the authority to make and the power to enforce laws within a civil, corporate, religious, academic and other organization. At a nation level, government commonly refers to the administration of a state, in general to the executive function or branch of the body of the exercising authority. The level of government responsible for running a district, province or city is also referred as local government in contrast with bodies at nation-state level (I will be back on this later).

1.1. GOVERNANCE, GOOD GOVERNANCE AND DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE

When most people hear the word governance they think of government. After all, both have the same root word (xνβερνν) from the Greek language, which means "to steer". But governance is about more than just government. It is a complex yet universal force that exists in all societies. People use governance in their daily lives to manage human relationships, just as corporations and countries do to manage their interactions and activities5.

In this regard, and considering its meaning in the Greek language, an useful metaphor to describe governance is referred to steering a ship. "Steering a ship, in fact, is not only a matter of keeping the ship afloat and in forward, backward, or sideways motion. It is knowing the direction to be taken and ensuring that the ship is constantly on course in that direction. Above all, for everyone in the ship and those waiting for its arrival, a captain can claim good seamanship only when the ship gets to where it is expected"6. As an act of steering a people's development, governance is about processes not about ends.

The World Bank has identified three distinct aspects of governance: 1. the form of political regime; 2. the process by which authority is exercised in the management of a country's economic and social resources for development; 3. the capacity of governments to design, formulate and implement policies and discharge functions (World Bank, 1997).

For UNDP, governance is viewed as the exercise of economic, political and administrative authority to manage a country's affairs at all levels. It is about the process by which government, the private sector, citizens and groups articulate their interests, mediate their differences, and exercise their legal rights and obligations (UNDP, 1997).

For UNESCO, governance refers to the exercise of political, economic and administrative authority in the management of a country's affairs, including citizens' articulation of their interests and exercise of their legal rights and obligations.7

The concept of governance defined by OECD denotes the use of political authority and exercise of control in a society in relation to the management of its resources for social and economic development (OECD, 1995). This broad definition encompasses the role of public authorities in establishing the environment in which economic operators function and in determining the distribution of benefits as well as the nature of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled.

According to the Institute of Governance,8 governance comprises the institutions, processes and conventions in a society which determine how power is exercised, how important decisions affecting society are made and how various interests are accorded a place in such decisions (Institute of Governance, 2002).

The Commission on Global Governance defines it as the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and co-operative action may be taken. It includes formal institutions and regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed or perceive to be in their interest (Commission on Global Governance, 1995).9

As we have seen, definitions of governance by leading institutions and studies converge on the term as meaning by which power is exercised.

Having now made clear the concept of governance as a "participatory process", we can better understand why it has become a truism to say that good governance is essential for successful development. But what is good in good governance and what are the implications for development ?

The concept of governance in the context of the promotion of sustainable economic development comprises efficient government, effective civil society and a successful private sector. Good governance has many characteristics. Good governance systems are participatory in that the members of governance institutions have a voice in the decision making process based on democratic traditions. The procedures and methods of decision making reflect transparency to ensure effective participation. The governance system aims at bringing about sustainable development, which is defined as "improving economic efficiency, protection and restoration of the environment and enhancing wellbeing of people" (International Institute of Sustainable Development, 1995).

While governance is a neutral concept, good governance addresses the allocation and management of resources to respond to collective problems. A universally agreed position on what constitutes good governance is hard to come by. However, conceptually, it is characterised by the principles of participation, transparency, accountability, rule of law, effectiveness, equity and strategic vision (UNDP, 1997).

By definition, good governance is the positive aspect of governance. But what about bad governance?

Bad governance is defined by Weiss as "the personalisation of power, lack of human rights, endemic corruption and unelected and unaccountable governments"10

When we speak of the quality of a country's governance, then, we mean the degree to which its institutions and processes are transparent and accountable to the people and allow them to participate in decisions that affect their lives. It is also the degree to which the private sector and organisations of the civil society are free and able to participate11.

Good governance is a concept that has come into regular use in political science, public administration and, more particularly, development management. It appears alongside terms such as democracy, civil society, participation, human rights and sustainable development. In the last decade, it has been closely associated with public sector reform. As indicated by the Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi A. Annan "Good governance is perhaps the single most important factor in eradicating poverty and promoting development"12.

According to the United Nations, good governance promotes equity and equality of treatment to all based on the concept of non-discrimination. The basic consideration in good governance is being able to develop the resources and methods of governance. In the context of social development parameters, it promotes gender balance, enables synthesis of diverse perspectives and mobilises resources for social purposes. Good governance strengthens indigenous mechanisms and ensures efficient and effective use of resources. All civilised societies are supposed to be based on the rule of law which is an essential component of good governance and that should engenders and commands respect and trust.13

According to OECD, good governance has eight major characteristics. It is participatory, consensus oriented, accountable, transparent, responsive, effective and efficient, equitable and inclusive and follows the rule of law. It assures that corruption is minimised, the views of minorities are taken into account and that the voices of the most vulnerable in society are heard in decision making. It is also responsive to the present and future needs of society.14

Participation by both men and women is a cornerstone of good governance. Participation could be either direct or through legitimate intermediate institutions or representatives. It is important to point out that representative democracy does not necessarily mean that the concerns of the most vulnerable in society would be taken into consideration in decision making. Participation needs to be informed and organised. This means freedom of association and expression on the one hand and an organised civil society on the other.

Consensus oriented: considering there are several actors and as many viewpoints in a given society, good governance requires mediation of the different interests in society to reach a broad consensus on what is in the best interest of the whole community and how this can be achieved. It requires a broad and long-term perspective on what is needed for sustainable human development and how to achieve the goals of such development. This can only results from an understanding of the historical, cultural and social contexts of a given society or community.

Accountability is a key requirement of good governance. Not only governmental institutions but also the private sector and civil society organisations must be accountable to the public and to their institutional stakeholders. Who is accountable to whom varies depending on whether decisions or actions taken are internal or external to an organisation or institution. In general an organisation or an institution is accountable to those who will be affected by its decisions or actions. Accountability cannot be enforced without transparency and the rule of law.

Transparency means that decisions taken and their enforcement are done in a manner that follows rules and regulations. It also means that information is freely available and directly accessible to those who will be affected by such decisions and the enforcement of those decisions. It also means that enough information is provided and that it is provided in easily understandable forms and media.

Responsiveness: Good governance requires that institutions and processes try to serve all stakeholders within a reasonable timeframe.

Effectiveness and efficiency: Good governance means that processes and institutions produce results that meet the needs of society whilst making the best use of resources at their disposal. The concept of efficiency in the context of good governance also covers the sustainable use of natural resources and the protection of the environment.

Equity and inclusiveness: A society's wellbeing depends on ensuring that all its members feel that they have a stake in it and do not feel excluded from the mainstream of society. This requires that all groups, but particularly the most vulnerable, have opportunities to improve or maintain their wellbeing.

Rule of Law: Good governance requires fair legal frameworks that are enforced impartially. It also requires full protection of human rights, particularly those of minorities. Impartial enforcement of laws needs an independent judiciary and an impartial and incorruptible police force.

In brief, according to the general principle of International Organisations, good governance is when the authority of the government is based on the will of the people and is responsive to them. It is when open, democratic institutions allow full participation in political affairs and when human rights protection guarantees the right to speak, assemble and dissent. And it is when government and governmental institutions are pro-poor and promote the human development of all citizens. In short, it distinguishes between the institutions and processes of governance and their content and quality.

A definition that summarises the concept of governance and good governance which can be universally recognised is the following:

Building on these ideas, the UNDP Human Development Report 200215 elaborated the concept of democratic governance, that is, governance that would promote human development. Like the concept of good governance, democratic governance seeks efficient institutions and a predictable economic and political environment necessary for growth and effective functioning of public services.

It is defined as follows:

The concept of democratic governance shares with humane governance the concerns with political freedom and human rights and the removal of discrimination as central objectives. A reform agenda would aim not only at building institutions and rules that are not just efficient but also fair, and that are developed through a democratic process in which all people have a real political voice. Democratic governance thus incorporates the notion of good governance for development, democratic processes and institutions and a concern with the securing of political and civil rights and freedoms as human rights.

Democratic governance is therefore considered as the most "human-development-friendly system of governance"16. However, we should also consider that democracy is a value that has different meaning in different cultures, and especially, that it is not only participation as it is often – in a simplistic way – referred to. And this is particularly true when it comes to ICTs.

In many cases, in fact, it is argued that introducing ICTs in Government can increase democracy, because it enlarges participation to public affairs. But this is not always the case, and, more important, it is not enough to enable changes.

1.2. LOCAL GOVERNANCE AND DECENTRALISATION

If we recognise the concept and definition of government and governance as indicated above, then we can discuss their implications at local level, trying to define the major forms of public sector decentralisation arrangements. But first of all what do we intend for local government?

In modern nations, local governments usually have fewer powers than national governments do. They usually have some power to raise taxes, though these may be limited by central legislation. In some countries local government is partly or wholly funded by subventions from central government taxation. The question of Municipal Autonomy - which powers the local government has, or should have, and why - is a key question of public administration and governance.

The institutions of local government vary greatly between countries, and even where similar arrangements exist, the terminology often varies. Common names for local government entities include state, province, region, department, county, district, city, township, town, borough, parish and village. However all these names are often used informally in countries where they do not describe a legal local government entity.

Local Government can therefore be defined as follows:

Now, if we consider the concept of governance at a local level, we will then have the definition of Local Governance.

But not all governance practices at a local level would constitute local governance. It is possible to have central governance or even foreign governance at local level. "What determines whether governance is local or not is the extent to which the local population is involved in the steering (i.e. in determining the direction) according to their local needs, problems and priorities"17.

In this sense, governance ceases to be a matter of government only. It is a situation of multiple inter-linkages and relationships in which different and various actors in the public and private sectors as well as civil society – at local, national and international levels – play different roles sometimes mutually conflicting and sometimes mutually reinforcing and complementary, focussing on satisfying the interests of the local community.

In this framework, local governance is not good by definition, but it can be assumed that good local governance involves a good management of administration at local level, including inter-administrative and inter-sectoral linkages.

Thus, the definition of Good Local Governance can be as follows:

Linked to the concept of local governance is of course the idea of decentralisation.

Conceptually, decentralisation relates to the role of, and the relationship between, central and sub-national institutions, whether they are public, private or civic.

The concept and definition of decentralisation has evolved over time and has acquired several shades of meaning. The "Classic" Decentralisation, as Mawhood and Davey described it, has rarely taken place.

Instead, regimes in developing countries modified the term to fit different types of administrative setups.18

According to the Fifth African Governance Forum V, decentralisation is defined as follows:

Organisationally, decentralisation, or decentralised governance, refers to the restructuring of authority so that there is a system of co-responsibility between institutions of governance at central, regional and local levels according to the "principle of subsidiarity", thus increasing the overall quality and effectiveness of the governance system, while increasing the authority and capacities of sub-national levels.20

Broadly speaking, according to the United Nations, decentralisation can take the form of either devolution, deconcentration, delegation, or outsourcing, defined as follows:

Of the four forms of decentralisation described above, deconcentration represents the least amount of transfer of power to local people. Delegation also does not by itself transfer power to the locals, although the delegated agencies have the scope for involving local people in their decision making process. It is the two other forms, namely devolution and outsourcing/transfer-partnership when it is referred to civil society organisations that provide the largest scope for developing genuinely local level governance based on popular participation, through mobilizing the capacity and initiatives of civil society organizations working for social and economic development. Overall, according to studies and analysis, in Africa, decentralisation has, to a different degree, by and large taken the form of deconcentration and delegation.21

1.3. ICTS, E-GOVERNMENT, E-GOVERNANCE AND E-PARTICIPATION

The overall objective of improving the governance systems and the performance of the public administration at all levels, enhancing the delivery of the public services to all citizens, can greatly benefit from the integration of ICTs in the process of decision making, planning, co-ordination and management carried out by governments. But what are ICTs and why should we integrate ICTs in the government process?

On a point of definition we talk of ICTs, adding "communications" to the more familiar "Information Technology". This reflects the increasing role of both information and communications technologies in all aspects of society. Generally speaking, ICTs are defined by Stevenson in his 1997 report to the UK government and promoted by the new National Curriculum documents for the UK in 2000 as: "The study of the technology used to handle information and aid communication"22. But what we are interested in, more than the study of technologies, is the application to improve and "channel" information through any means of communication, based on different infrastructure. So it is important to understand what is information and what is communication. The World Bank defines ICTs as a generic term, which includes Information Technology (hardware and software) and the telecommunication infrastructure, equipment and services.

According to J. Habib Sy, "Information refers to knowledge, strategic and non-strategic research results as well as patented or licensed information increasingly commoditised in public and private channels at a cost commensurate with its technological, commercial, military, educational or social value". Despite being a bit complicated, this means that information is an essential ingredient in any historical communication system and a central condition for capital accumulation and wealth generation. "Communication refers instead to processes and effects within a given social context in which senders and receivers of messages enter into transactions of some sort". For Sy, "ICTs refer mainly to people and the way they relate to each other either individually or in a group rather than the technology. Technology, in this context, is neither a necessary and sufficient condition for social progress nor a means for leapfrogging"23.

Therefore, recent literature uses interchangeably the word ICTs and Info-communication to signify the following:

Thus, what is important about ICTs is their capacity for improving the communication between people: that is defined as the quint-essential aspect of human society. In fact, human beings have always used communication to inform, learn, define concepts and viewpoints, deliberate and reach agreements, in private and public life. The electronic features of modern ICTs can be put into this timeless communication process and benefit from doing so24.

The definition of the Quintessence of ICTs made by Dr. Joseph Okpaku in one of his instructive papers is instrumental in this regard.

In this respect, ICTs either as a tool or structural productivity lever, support both ordinary communication and innovation networking environments; they also, along the way, modify lifestyles, organi­sational boundaries and institutional adaptation capabilities. They help solve problems but also feed divides of various natures. They are supposed to define a new social paradigm, the Information Society, a world of promises, still to a large extent to be verified.

The e-world developed in this context, the Internet was the tool that, in the area of already existing computing instruments and applications, changed it all. Private initiatives came first, pioneering sectors being the banks, tourism, aviation, the military, then as somewhat a post Internet bubble remedy, but certainly in the continuation of messianic announcements by Al Gore and Martin Bangemann in the early nineties, state-supported efforts to develop converging strategies emerged, in OECD countries first, before expanding as a standard programme or at least an expectation in all countries, regions and municipalities of the world26.

In this connection, it is worth underlining the role of ICTs as a tool for development, and not as a goal in itself. Using ICTs can help achieve development goals. This is particularly true in relation to government operations and governance in general. The integration of ICTs in governmental operations introduces the concept of Electronic Government, Digital Government or – in short – e-government.

This development has started in some isolated cases somewhat before the Internet (digital cities, like Amsterdam, for instance), but of course, the nineties were the period during which all this really took off. Measuring the deployment of e-government became a considerable business, benchmarking countries and regions in terms of initially, how much they could show as far as computer and Internet accesses were concerned, then various forms of "readiness" or administrative sophistication they could report upon became a "must to". More recently, measurement started to become a more scientific endeavour, coping with complex and partially contradicting features to benchmark efficiency, effectiveness, openness, etc. This debate is now open to emphasising real impact or track effectiveness with figures and verifiable models and all indications show that we are only at the beginning of this process.

Technological evolution may also soon prove to be a strong modifier of the initial e-government development framework, wireless solutions, satellite coverage and access and even more, mobile phone expanding potential.

After a few hesitations about terms, digital government, e-administration and others led to a more consensual formulation to this underpinning effort, and the e-government era emerged. In fact, there are many definitions of e-government, and the term itself is not universally used. The differences are not just semantic and may reflect priorities in government strategies.

According to Prof. Claudio Ciborra, in literature, e-government is mainly referred to as having three levels:

– the relationship (transaction) between the administration and the citizen (customer) and the related re-engineering of the activities internal to the administration (Bellamy and Taylor, 1998);

– the way in which the boundaries between the state and the market are redrawn, by the creation of an electronic, minimal state, more transparent, agile and accountable (Heeks, 1999, Stiglitz and Orszag 2000);

– the purpose of aid policies aimed at introducing e-government into developing countries, to improve accountability and transparency as key characteristics of good governance (UNDP, 2001)27.

According to the OECD, the definitions of e-government fall into three groups:

– e-government is defined as Internet (online) service delivery and other Internet-based activity, such as e-consultation;

– e-government is equated to the use of ICTs in government. While the focus is generally on the delivery of services and processing, the broadest definition encompasses all aspects of government activity;

– e-government is defined as a capacity to transform public administration through the use of ICTs or indeed is used to describe a new form of government built around ICTs. This aspect is usually linked to Internet use.

The definition of e-government of the OECD is therefore simply "The use of ICTs, and in particular the Internet, as a tool to achieve better government"28.

Adding a level of complexity, the European Union Commission defines e-government as "the use of ICTs in public administra­tions combined with organisational change and new skills in order to improve public services and democratic processes and strengthen support for public policies"29.

For the World Bank, e-government refers to the use by government agencies of information technologies (such as Wide Area Networks, the Internet, and mobile computing) that have the ability to transform relationships with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government. These technologies can serve a variety of different ends: better delivery of government services to citizens, improved interactions with business and industry, citizen empowerment through access to information, or more efficient government management. The resulting benefits can be less corruption, increased transparency, greater convenience, revenue growth and/or cost reductions.30

In a simpler and easy manner, Prof. Dele Olowu, in a book published by UNECA, defines e-government as "all the information and communication technology platforms and applications in use in the public sector or the use of the internet for delivering government information and services to citizens"31.

If we consider the ICTs as a "facilitator" in improving governance, through "re-inventing" the role of governments, providing tools to support public service reforms, enhance public administration management and public sector performance vis-à-vis the private sector and the citizens, we arrive at the concept of Transformational e-government. This, at its best, can be viewed as the process of creating public value with the use of modern ICTs, where public value is defined by Kelly and others (2001) as "the value created by Government through services, laws, regulations and other actions", or, by the United Nations in a simpler (or maybe too simplistic) way, as "the things that people want"32.

A definition of e-government in this sense, that is comprehensive and summarises the concept of transformational state, is provided by the private sector, and in particular Gartner Research, which has been one of the pioneers in this area. It also reflects the operational approach that is typical of the business-oriented experience of private companies, and is as follows: "the continuous optimization of Government service delivery, constituency participation, and governance by transforming internal and external relationships through technology, the Internet and new media. In particular, e-government technologies can improve significantly the capacity of co-ordination among different branches and bodies of government, and communication among governments, citizens and business"33.

The model of development for this pervasive effort is the famous stage concept of Gartner (2000), which has since been reformulated with minor variations. It supposed stages of phases and complexity through which government and, in most cases it should be more accurate to say the administration, deploys means of providing information and gradually more interaction-based service access to the users, online.

According to the United Nations "World Public Sector Report 2003: e-government at the Crossroads", "e-government is a government that applies ICTs to transform its internal and external relationships. Through the application of ICTs to its operations, a government does not alter its functions or its obligation to remain useful, legitimate, transparent and accountable. If anything, this application raises society's expectations about the performance of government, in all respects, to a much higher level"34.

An evolution of this concept (2005; 2006; UNDESA) brings about the definition of E/M-Government (e-government / Mobile Government) as follows.

"The application of ICTs within and by the public sector, that provides government, the citizen and business with a set of tools that can potentially transform the way in which interactions take place, services are delivered, and public administration reform and good governance goals are met35.

In this regard, it is assumed that "the strategic use of ICTs in government can result in a more inclusive, effective, efficient, transparent and accountable public administration, which will be key to improved economic development and competitiveness. Moreover, in enhancing the quality and delivery of public services through ICTs - especially in education, health, social security and social welfare - government may be better positioned to reduce poverty, redress inequality, and promote sustainable development"36.

This definition and conceptual framework is, in my opinion, appropriate to identify the developmental role of ICTs and the transformative potential of the impact of ICTs. However, it also highlights the limitations of e-government as a real transformative process in itself, considering its focus on only one of the functions of the State, namely the service delivery.

Therefore, considering the numerous definitions of e-government, the working definition of e-government that I propose here is "a middle-of-the-road concept", that is as follows:

Considering instead the combination of ICTs with governance in the sense we formulated it above, e-government is more and more moving towards e-governance, where the concept of e-governance further encompasses e-government. e-governance is a growing phenomenon around the world and is emerging as a significant discipline, initially within the field of public administration reform, but that is now being realised as not only being a "government business", but a societal challenge as well.

e-governance is defined by the Inter-American Development Bank as being "beyond the scope of e-government.......", and in particular by Blake Harris that, to summarise, says that "e-governance is not just about government websites and email, etc..." and that "....it will change how citizens relate to governments as much as it changes how citizens relate to each other"38.

UNESCO defines e-governance as "the public sector's use of information and communication technologies with the aim of improving information and service delivery, encouraging citizen participation in the decision-making process and making government more accountable, transparent and effective"39.

The Pacific Institute of Management in India equates e-governance with smart governance and uses the acronym SMART to define it as the "application of ICTs to the process of government functioning to bring out Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsive and Transparent governance". The government of India has used this as the basis for its vision statement for e-governance and for the development of strategic initiatives and further objectives as outlined in what was termed an Indicative Roadmap to enact that vision.40

Different approaches are that of Gordon, who defines e-governance rather more narrowly as "the use of ICTs to improve the quality and efficiency of all phases of the life cycle of legislation". Vikas Nath, active on the Internet, defines e-governance as "Governance processes in which ICTs play an active and significant role". Gurstein and others emphasise the role of citizen as the basis for e-governance as in "the use of ICTs as a means to enhance the role of citizens in relation to their capacity and opportunity for effective participation in the broad structures of governance"41.

A working definition of e-governance for Africa has also been developed -with my support- by the African Training and Research Centre in Administration for Development (CAFRAD) within the framework of the e-Africa Initiative for Good Governance: Building e-governance capacity in African countries. It defines e-governance as "the use of ICTs, and especially the Internet, to adopt a new conception and attitude of governing and managing where participation and efficiency are required of all the partners linked in a network: e-governance is therefore a new way of co-ordinating, planning, formulating and implementing decisions and operations related to governance problems. Governments can utilise e-governance to re-invent themselves, get closer to the citizenry and forge closer alliances and partnerships with diverse communities of interest, practice, expertise, conviction and inter-dependence within the context of national and international development agendas"ap. This definition is probably, in my opinion, the more appropriate to the African context, and it highlights how, as a concept and an emerging practice, e-governance seeks to realise processes and structures for harnessing the potentialities of ICTs at various levels of government and beyond, of the public sector, for the purpose of enhancing good governance and, in particular, citizens' participation.

But it is clear that the concept of e-governance is not commonly recognised and shared worldwide. Quite the contrary. For many, e-governance is just one more buzzword for e-government. For others, who aim at specific identifications, e-governance is merely an indication of the impact of e-government outside the administration boundaries, in particular when private economy actors are active stakeholders.

Looking at prevalent literature and definitions, as pointed out by Finger (2003, 2004 and further elaborated by Finger, Rossel and Misuraca, 2005, 2006), we can identify three main conceptualisations of e-governance: 1) e-governance as customer satisfaction; 2) e-governance as processes and interactions and 3) e-governance as tools43.

The first and probably most widespread conceptualisation refers to customer satisfaction. Indeed, the term e-governance is not only used here as being synonymous of e-government, it is moreover synonymous with satisfying the citizen/customer by means of delivering the services through the Internet. Generally, this is the view of promoters of new public management who see in the ICTs a significant contribution to, and the next step in, improving service delivery and especially customer satisfaction. For this conceptualisation, the main unit of analysis is the government or rather the administration, whose interface with the citizens the ICTs are said to be going to improve. As a matter of fact, citizens are seen here as more or less passive recipients of digitalised information and services, i.e., as customers. In other words, at the heart of this conceptualisation it is not the process to which the ICTs are being applied, but merely the delivery of information and sometimes services. Needless to say that this view does not take into account the possible other policy levels that the state may need to cope with and, also, it does not mention the emergence of non-state actors who become increasingly involved in policy-making, service delivery and to a lesser extend regulation - the three main functions of the state44.

In the second conceptualisation e-governance is seen as a decisional process. The International Centre of e-governance says for example, "Governance is not government, nor is it the act of governing. It is more usefully seen as a process: the process by which institutions, organisations, companies and societies guide themselves. It is also about how these bodies interact with each other, with their clients and with the public. At its most basic level, it is about how society organises itself for collective decision making, and also provides transparent mechanisms for seeing those decisions through. E-governance is a shorthand term for the use and impact of technology, in particular ICTs, in governance systems." Similarly, the e-governance Institute of Rutgers University states: "e-governance involves new channels for accessing government, new styles of leadership, new methods of transacting business, and new systems for organizing and delivering information and services. Its potential for enhancing the governing process is immeasurable." Here, the focus is clearly on processes and interactions, which the ICTs are said to foster or at least to facilitate. Potentially, the conceptualisation could also be extended to transactions. However, the view of the state remains quite traditional: indeed, it means interactions between the citizens and the private sector on the one hand and the state on the other. However, the state remains always at the centre of the process.

The third conceptualisation sees e-governance as a set of tools in the hands of government, or rather in the hands of the administration. In other words, the starting point here is not the state or its transformation, but the possibilities that ICTs offer. According to the Commonwealth Centre for e-governance (CGeG), it is the movement of governments online to deliver their services and programmes, to provide government information, and to interact with the citizen, all electronically. This is resulting in the formation of new relationships between the citizen and the state.

In particular, CGeG says: "e-governance is a tool. And like any other tool, no matter how powerful, it has limited value and relevance in itself. Its value arises from its application to specific goals and objectives. E-governance is really about choice. It is about providing citizens with the ability to choose the manner in which they wish to interact with their governments."..."E-governance is the commitment to utilise appropriate technologies to enhance governmental relationships, both internal and external, in order to advance democratic expression, human dignity and autonomy, support economic development and encourage the fair and efficient delivery of services"45.

Following this and other research, in particular from the Riley Reports, the Commonwealth Centre for e-governance notes that "e-governance differs from e-government in the sense that e-government constitutes the ways public sector institutions use technology to apply public administration principles and conduct the business of government: it is government using new tools to enhance the delivery of existing services. E-governance includes the vision, strategies, planning, leadership and resources needed to carry this out: it is the way that political and social power are organised and used"46.

This is parallel to the discussion by Okot Uma (2001 and 2005), which focusses on the direct contribution that the "e" plays in advancing principles of governance and particularly good governance. Indeed, he says, "e-governance seeks to realise processes and structures for harnessing the potentialities of information and communication technologies at various levels of government and at the public sector and beyond, for the purpose of enhancing good governance". Better governance, thanks to the ICTs, would improve, according to Okot-Uma, democracy and ultimately peoples' lives47.

Not surprisingly, e-governance is not structured along concepts of state transformation, but rather along technological possibilities. Says Perri, one of the representatives of this conceptualisation of e-governance: "one way to classify e-governance systems is roughly according to the main tool for which they are used. There are tools for 1) generating understanding simple data; 2) collecting data or observations through search agents; 3) organising and analysing data on events, conditions, problems and processes; 4) supporting communication and transaction e-mail, electronic conferencing, video-conferencing systems; 5) modelling decisions and advising on possible consequences spreadsheets; 6) and environments that provide integration and storage for the other categories".

In other words, this conceptualisation is characterised by a strange combination of quite unreflected use of ICTs on the one hand and visionary (or even normative) statements on democracy and "good governance" on the other. It clearly puts the ICTs before the state, and actually operates with, in the opinion of Finger and others (2003, 2005), a quite simplistic and old-fashioned, and in any case naïve vision of the State. In particular, it is not dynamic, as it does not see the implications of the ICTs on operations, nor on state transformation.

In summary, looking at the main, currently prevalent conceptualisations of e-governance, it can be seen that there are still quite different understandings of what e-governance is, ranging from naïve and promotional views (e-governance as tools for democracy) to simplistic and unambitious ideas of using the ICTs for enhancing service delivery only (e-governance as customer satisfaction), passing through the one which sees e-governance as a dynamic process, i.e., mainly as an enhancement of interactions between actors (citizens/consumers, administration, private sector, civil society)48.

Given the above, I postulate that there is a need to consider a more radical paradigmatic shift. As a complementary activity but inherently different from e-government, e-governance is the field of activity where co-ordination, arbitration, networking and regulation (just to mention essential steering functions), with ICTs, but also of ICTs, involved with all sorts of non-state actors, the state representatives being at best one of the stakeholders49.

There are basically two converging processes that support the activities in the e-governance arena. One which stems from insufficient coverage, by the state, of problems that need to be solved but in which most solutions, experiments and expertise, from design to usage, are mainly carried out by non state actors, as innovative moves or as survival needs.

The other process, emerging from technology or service users, as inhabitants or as specific customers of a given economic market, individuals, communities or local enterprises, expresses some form of bottom-up creativity in which the state may play a role but only after the interactions and processes tackled reach a certain level of consistency. It is particularly true in the ICT area, where new services, habits, components or even technological ecosystems (let us think of Ipod, digital photography, smartphone applications or GPS-based services) emerge with barely any state presence of any kind.

E-governance is an intermediation arena in which negotiations, experiments and networking make important use of ICTs and in turn may also be dealing with some regulation of ICTs. After a while, in particular in the second case, the state tries to control it, sometimes with success (standardisation in WIFI for instance), sometimes not (governance of the Internet). In other cases, the issues are still open (pornography, intellectual property rights of ICT multimedia products, etc.).

In an attempt to advocate a "muddling through approach" rather than an idealistic one, in my opinion, and in this supported by research carried out in the last few years, I summarize the analysis by saying that differently from e-government, e-governance stresses the importance of the several components and multi-dimensional capacity of ICTs, the learning residing much more in the causality chain than the other way around.

For each technological implementation, for each e-service delivered, beyond their obvious instrumental level, there is in fact an organizational and institutional dimension, more governance-oriented, to be taken care of, in which ICT-deployment must be defined within the framework of a policy-compliant and inter-stakeholder knowledge management-effective perspective. This allows the slide from e-government to e-governance.

Society in fact is not harmonious and just saying that e-governance, like governance is about the transactional aspect of inter-actor life would not account for the complexity of what really takes place, it is also confrontational. Stakeholders have to muddle their way through even when they are not fundamentally friends, inter-industry-wise and inter-level-wise. This is why e-governance can be seen as the expression of a "dynamic tension" between institutional frameworks and ICTs.

Therefore, in a point of conceptualisation, we must take into consideration the multi-dimensional aspects of ICTs when discussing e-governance. In this regard, in a simple but, in my opinion very effective way, e-governance can therefore be defined as: the Governance "with and of" ICTs50.

There are in fact, two side of the coin: "with" means basically "bureautic", web-based and connective type of technologies and applications or rather said mediation-supportive technologies and applications; meanwhile governance of ICTs means dealing in terms of innovation and regulation with all the technologies of the Information society (from tele-surveillance to GPS, through transport telematics and virtual community management applications, just to mention a few). (I will be back on this).

Complementary to the concept of e-governance, are the concepts of e-Participation and e-Democracy, which deal with how the citizen interacts with government and influences the legislative or public sector process. These concepts and emerging movements seek to engage the citizen with government and legislatures through the use of ICTs. According to some activists, this new dynamic that is developing between the citizen and government can actually result in giving some measure of power to the citizen. The distribution of information (if critical) can in fact produce some distribution of power since government information is no longer restricted to the political and bureaucratic elite.51

But before I present some definitions of e-Participation and e-Democracy that this approach involves and which is becoming popular on the web and among practitioners, despite it is evident that it is more a wishful thinking that a proven reality, it has to be considered that for countries, especially in the developing regions, there is the need to ensure (before even thinking of "going e", the correct introduction and utilisation of ICTs and e-government applications. Of particular importance is therefore the concept of "e-readiness", as defined by Richard Heeks:

In this regard, it has to be considered that included in the vision of the UN General Assembly Millennium Declaration, is the reaffirmation by the member states that they "....resolve to work collectively for more inclusive political processes, allowing genuine participation by all citizens in all countries... and the right of the public to have access to information....."53 Within this framework, e-Participation has been defined as follows:

Looking at the concept of e-participation, according to the methodology and results of the UN Global e-government Survey, which presents a ranking of countries in the world referring to two primary indicators (e-government Readiness Index and e-Participation Index), the following e-Participation framework has been devised:

Much of the analysis and the literature on the issues of e-governance, e-participation and e-democracy, highlights that, so far, governments are mainly concerned with organising ways for a better delivery of their services to the citizens, while there is little evidence that the citizen is having any significant input into how e-government will evolve.

It is not the objective of this work to analyse and discuss in-depth the issue of e-democracy, especially because there are as many interpretations of what constitutes e-democracy as there are interpretations of democracy. Moreover, since this concept is in its early stages, there remains much confusion about what it encompasses and how to clearly define it56.

However, to take advantage of the studies undertaken by individuals on this subject, a definition of e-democracy by Steven Clift is referred to57:

In conclusion, what can be said here is that this new participatory approach to running governance affairs, involving both the public sector, the private sector and the civil society, despite represents for the time being only an optimistic hypothesis should be implemented taking into consideration that the development of ICTs, and especially that of the Internet, is in principle able to improve the quality of life and blurring national boundaries. Through "e-space", the traditional concept of citizenship can be transformed into "active citizenship" and the next step is likely to be the establishment of systems based on online consultation and participation, according to some experiences already available in both industrialised and developing countries58. However, if this will automatically enhance democracy is yet to be proven.

Notes

1. Okpaku Joseph, "e-Culture, Human Culture and In-Between: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century Digital World", Address to the ITU Conference on "Creating New Leaders for e-Culture", Coventry, UK, August, 2001

2. Misuraca Gianluca, Overview of the e-Africa initiative for good governance: building e-governance capacity in Africa, Encyclopedia of Developing Regional Communities with Information and Communication Technology, IDEA May 2005.

3. e-government Policy Network of the Privy Council Office (PCO) "Transforming Government and Governance for the 21st Century", www.publiservice.pco-bcp.ga/egov-cybergouv 2003

4. The Global Forum on Re-inventing Government (and related publications and reports) is organized (every two years now) by the Division for Public Administration and Development Management of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DPADM/UNDESA). Gianluca Misuraca was a member of the organizing committee of the 4th Global Forum on Reinventing Government, Marrakech, Morocco, 2002, and contributed in the 5th Global Forum on Reinventing Government, Mexico City, 2003. See also www.unpan.org

5. Cheema Shabbir and Maguire Linda, "Democracy, and Development: A Conceptual Framework"; Background Paper of the 4th Global Forum on Re-inventing Government - Citizens, Businesses and Governments: Dialogue and partnerships for Development and Democracy, Marrakech, Morocco, 10-13 December 2002, UN, New York 2002. www.unpan.org - www.globalforum.ma

6. Kauzya John-Mary, "Local Governance Capacity Building for Full Range Participation: Concepts, Frameworks, and Experiences in African Countries"; Background Paper of the 4th Global Forum on Re-inventing Government - Citizens, Businesses and Governments: Dialogue and partnerships for Development and Democracy, Marrakech, Morocco, 10-13 December 2002, UN, New York 2002. www.unpan.org - www.globalforum.ma

7. www.portal-unesco.org, 2003

8. The Institute on Governance is a NGO based in Ottawa, Canada, www.iog.ca

9. Fukuda-Parr Sakiko and Ponzio Richard, "Governance: Past Present and Future"; Background Paper of the 4th Global Forum on Re-inventing Government - Citizens, Businesses and Governments: Dialogue and partnerships for Development and Democracy, Marrakech, Morocco, 10-13 December 2002, UN, New York 2002. www.unpan.org - www.globalforum.ma

10. Weiss Thomas, "Governance, Good Governnace and Global Governance: Conceptual and Actual Challenges", Third World Quarterly, Vol. 21, n.5, 2000

11. Cheema Shabbir and Maguire Linda, "Democracy, Governance and Development: A Conceptual Framework"; Background Paper of the 4th Global Forum on Re-inventing Government - Citizens, Businesses and Governments: Dialogue and partnerships for Development and Democracy, Marrakech, Morocco, 10-13 December 2002, UN, New York 2002. www.unpan.org - www.globalforum.ma

12. Kofi Annan, Millennium Declaration, United Nations 2000.

13. UNDESA, Economic Governance: Guidelines for Effective Financial Management, New York, 2000.

14. This definition of good governance is taken from an OECD e-book entitled Citizens as Partners - Information, Consultation and Public Participation in Policy-Making, 2001

15. UNDP, Human Development Report 2002, "Deepening democracy in a fragmented world", UN, NY, 2002.

16. Falk Richard, Prof, "On Humane Governance", University Park, The Pensyllvania State University, 1995.

17. Kauzya John-Mary, "Local Governance, Health and nutrition for all: problem magnitude and challenges with examples from Uganda and Rwanda", Paper presentation to the Global Forum on Local Governance and Social Services for All, Stockholm, Sweden, 2-5 May 2000.

18. Report of the workshop on Poverty Alleviation and Decentralization for ten West African countries, organized jointly by UNDESA and the Government of Senegal, Dakar, July, 2003.

19. The subsidiarity principle, as it is conceived in the Treaty of the European Union, is intended to ensure that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen and that constant checks are made as to whether action at Community level is justified in the light of the possibilities available at national, regional or local level. Specifically, it is the principle whereby the Union does not take action (except in the areas which fall within its exclusive competence) unless it is more effective than action taken at national, regional or local level. It is closely bound up with the principles of proportionality and necessity, which require that any action by the Union should not go beyond what is necessary to achieve the objectives of the Treaty, www.europa.eu.int

20. Work Robertson, "The Role of Participation and Partnership in Decentralized Governance: Lessons from Nine Local Case Studies on Service Delivery to the Poor"; Background Paper of the 4th Global Forum on Re-inventing Government - Citizens, Businesses and Governments: Dialogue and partnerships for Development and Democracy, Marrakech, Morocco, 10-13 December 2002, UN, New York 2002. www.unpan.org - www.globalforum.ma

21. Report of the workshop on Poverty Alleviation and Decentralization for ten West African countries, organized jointly by UNDESA and the Government of Senegal, Dakar, July, 2003. See also Katsiaouni, 2003.

22. Stevenson, 1997, in Computing Dictionary, http://www.hyperdictionary.com

23. Sy, J. Habib, "Critical and Prospective Views on ICTs and Governance in Africa", in "Africa Networking: Development Information ICTs and Governance, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, UNECA, Addis Ababa, 2004

24. Osorio C., "Public Ends by Digital Means: Some Thoughts for Creating Public Value", National Science Foundation, Digital Government Workshop, White Paper 2002.

25. Okpaku Joseph O. Sr., "The Role of ICTs in the African Development Agenda", keynote address to the CAFRAD, UNDESA, NEPAD e-Africa 2002: Regional Workshop on Building e-governance capacity in Africa, Johannesburg, South Africa, 28-31 October 2002.

26. Gianluca Misuraca, Matthias Finger, Pierre Rossel, "Governance with and of ICTs: the need for new institutional design in a changing world", egov magazine, Volume II – Issue 5, May 2006,

27. Ciborra Prof. Claudio, U., "Unveiling e-government and Development: Governing at a distance in the new war", Inaugural lecture at LSE on 24 October 2002

28. OECD, e-government Studies, "The e-government Imperative", 2003, www.oecd.org

29. EU, Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions – The Role of eGovernment for Europe's Future, 26 September 2003

30. World Bank, 2002 – www.worldbank.org

31. Olowu Dele, "Bridging the Digital Divide in Africa: Making the Governance Discourse Relevant", in Africa Networking: Development Information, ICTs and Governance, UNECA, Addis Ababa, 2004

32. For a complete definition of Public Value see United Nations, "World Public Sector Report 2003: e-government at the Crossroads", New York, 2003, www.unpan.org (Box 2, pag. 3).

33. Gartner Group, www.gartner.group.com

34. United Nations, "World Public Sector Report 2003: e-government at the Crossroads", New York, 2003, www.unpan.org

35. UNDESA/DPADM, www.unpan.org, 2005.

36. Idem.

37. This is a working definition that comes out of the evolutionary research framework developed by the author in collaboration with his colleagues within the framework of the Executive Master in e-governance at EPFL. For an overview of this conceptual framework see: Gianluca Misuraca Matthias Finger, Pierre Rossel, "Governance with and of ICTs: the need for new institutional design in a changing world", egov magazine, Volume II – Issue 5, May 2006, and also http://egov.epfl.ch

38. www.iadb.org/ict4dev/governance.htm

39. www.portal-unesco.org, 2003

40. www.pimanagement.org

41. For these definitions and discussions see: Gordon T.F., eGovernance and its value for Public Administration", White paper, e-government Competence Centre, Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communications Systems (FOCUS), Berlin, Germany, May 2006; Gurstein Michael, "From e-government to e-governance: an approach from effective use", Canadian Civil Society and the WSIS Conference on Paving the Road to Tunis, May 2005; and www.digitalgovernance.org

42. CAFRAD, e-Africa 2002: Building e-governance capacity in African countries, 2002, Project Proposal, edited with technical assistance of Mr Gianluca Misuraca.

43. See for example, Finger Matthias, Pecoud Gaëlle, "From e-government to e-governance? Towards a model of e-governance", 3rd European Conference on e-government, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, 3-4 July 2003. See also EPFL-e-Gov, working papers; and Rossel, Finger, From e-government to e-governance: implications for technology management, 2005

44. For a discussion about the State Transformation see, among others, Finger Matthias.

45. Gilbert Riley Cathia, "The Changing Role of Citizen in the e-governance & e-Democracy Equation", CceG, 2003, www.electronicgov.net

46. On this see also Sheridan and Riley (2006) and Riley 2003.

47. Okot-Uma Rogers W'O., "Electronic Governance: Re-inventing Good Governance", Commonwealth Secretariat, London, 2000.

48. Finger, Pecoud, op. cit.

49. The claim for new institutional designs is the results of both the professional activities I have carried out and the research I am involved within the framework of the Executive Master in e-governance at EPFL.

50. This is a working definition that comes out of the evolutionary research framework developed by the author in collaboration with his colleagues within the framework of the Executive Master in e-governance at EPFL. For an overview of this conceptual framework see: Matthias Finger, Gianluca Misuraca and Pierre Rossel, "Governance with and of ICTs: the need for new institutional design in a changing world", egov magazine, Volume II – Issue 5, May 2006, and also http://egov.epfl.ch

51. Gilbert Riley Cathia, "The Changing Role of Citizen in the e-governance & e-Democracy Equation", CceG, 2003, www.electronicgov.net

52. Richard Heeks - Institute for Development Policy and Management of the University of Manchester www.man.ac.uk/idpm.

53. United Nations Millennium Declaration, A/RES/55/2, 18 September 2000, www.un.org/millennium

54. United Nations, "World Public Sector Report 2003: e-government at the Crossroads", New York, 2003, www.unpan.org.

55. United Nations, "UN Global Survey on e-government", New York, 2003, www.unpan.org.

56. For a comprehensive analysis on this issue see Gilbert Riley Cathia, "The Changing Role of Citizen in the e-governance & e-Democracy Equation", CceG, 2003, www.electronicgov.net, Other definitions of e-Democracy are available on www.portal-unesco.org or from the International Teledemocracy Centre, Scotland, the UK-based Dialogue by Design, or by Ake Gronlund, from Umea, University of Sweden.

57. For a deeper analysis of e-Democracy, see also the e-Democracy Centre www.edc.org

58. IDEA, Conference on "Democracy and the Information Revolution, Stockholm, June 2001, www.idea.int

2
DECENTRALISATION AND LOCAL GOVERNANCE: BENEFITS AND LIMITS

2.1. BENEFITS OF DECENTRALISATION

Decentralisation and local governance are increasingly recognised as basic components of democratic governance, since they provide an enabling environment in which decision making and service delivery can be brought closer to the people, especially to the poor.

Decentralisation is instrumental in the overall issue of re-inventing government and is essential to achieving the internationally set Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Under the combined pressure of accelerating globalisation and persistent demands for deeper and expanded democratisation, central governments are seeing their traditional roles continuously challenged. Re-inventing government would then require revisiting the nature and role of the state itself and the sharing of political power and administrative responsibilities.1

But which are the benefits of decentralisation? and how does decentralisation contribute to the process of poverty reduction?

If we recall the key elements of good and democratic governance, and we consider them both for economic growth and as a means of achieving the MDGs, especially that relating to poverty reduction, decentralisation increases popular participation in decision making because it brings government closer to people, making it more accessible and knowledgeable about local conditions and more responsive to peoples' demands.

Central governments located far away and preoccupied mostly with national and regional issues, fall short of adequately and efficiently providing services essentially local in nature. The case for decentralisation can, in fact, be made on a number of grounds such as the following:

i. Local authorities tend to act more in line with local preferences and conditions, and their response to local needs is more expeditious. Decentralisation provides opportunities to marginalised sectors of the community, like women in some countries, minorities etc., to participate at the local level, enabling a more sensitive approach to policy formulation and implementation.

ii. Because decentralisation tends to enhance transparency and accountability, the amount of money wrongfully diverted away from development often declines. The Human Development Report (2003)2, underlines that in 55 countries, decentralisation of government spending was closely associated with lower corruption among bureaucrats and reduced rent seeking by private parties - leaving more money to spend on basic services for poor people.

iii. Decentralisation increases effectiveness in service delivery, like reducing absenteeism among government employees, for example, in local schools and health clinics because elected officials receive complaints from their constituents and can improve discipline.

iv. Decentralisation provides bureaucrats with early warnings of potential disasters, enabling quick remedial action.

v. Decentralisation makes development projects more sustainable and cost effective because local people are more likely to be involved in their design, execution, and monitoring.

vi. Decentralisation encourages communities to find solutions to their everyday problems, yielding innovative ideas, which are more attuned to local conditions.

vii. Decentralisation provides opportunities for more people, including the under-represented groups (like women in some countries, the poor, minorities etc.) to participate in decisions that affect their lives.

To summarise, because of a greater degree of accountability, responsiveness and participation, effective decentralisation can make a big difference by making the provision of local (social and economic) services more efficient, equitable, sustainable and cost-effective. Through community participation in decision making, planning, implementation and monitoring and backed by appropriate institutions and resources, it can go a long way in improving the quality of life, particularly of the poorer and marginalised sectors of the population, thereby alleviating poverty.3

2.2. CONSTRAINTS OF DECENTRALISATION

But does decentralisation always work? And which are the constraints of decentralisation? For the process of decentralisation to be complete and for it to be successful, there are certain preconditions which may not exist in a country at a given time.

According to the UNDP Human Development Report (2003), these prerequisites include:

1. Effective state capacity;

2. Empowered, committed and competent local authorities; and

3. Engaged, informed and organised citizens and civil society.

Decentralisation requires co-ordination between levels of government and more regulation -not less- to ensure basic transparency, accountability and representation. The state also has to raise adequate fiscal resources to support decentralisation. For the above to be achieved, effective state capacity is necessary. Furthermore, to ensure that the decentralisation effort is not hijacked by the local elites, and there is broad based participation, both a strong state and a mobilised civil society are required.

Decentralisation is influenced by a country's size, population, its political and institutional inheritance and diversity. These attributes have an important effect on the design and modalities of decentralisation, which are crucial for its success. Appropriateness of functions to be decentralised, adequacy of fiscal resources to be transferred to the sub-national government, efficacy of administrative and legal setups and sufficiency of technical/skilled personnel at all levels of government are important ingredients for successful decentralisation.4

However, politicians have more often than not used the slogan of decentralisation as rhetoric to strengthen their own power base rather than improve governance. In practice, the lack of willingness of the centre to relinquish or share power has been a major impediment to effective decentralisation. In fact, the inability to make the transition to a people-centred governance, with its commensurate implications for participation and empowerment is perhaps a bigger bottleneck in the process of decentralisation than legislative changes, which in their own right are also crucial.5

Finally, lack of public awareness and an absence of a culture of participation and a weak "voice'' of particularly the poor and marginalised sections of the population has inhibited the development of: firstly, a two way accountability system whereby local governments are not only supervised by an effective state government from above but also a strong civil society from below; secondly, a local government system which is responsive to the needs of all sections of populations, particularly the poor and the marginalised. As a matter of fact, the decision making process is dominated by local elites and government functionaries with little, if any, participation by the masses.

2.3. PARTICIPATION, ENGAGED GOVERNANCE AND THE ROLE OF THE CIVIL SOCIETY

However, "a process for participation does not ipso facto lead to empowerment, and to be consulted does not mean that one's voice had weight in decisions taken": one way of achieving this is through "engaged governance" whereby an attempt is made, through new forms of collaboration between citizens' groups and the public sector, to link social capital into the development management process of a country.6

In this context, the role of the Civil Society for Poverty Reduction can be instrumental. Recent years have witnessed a considerable surge of interest throughout the world in the broad range of social institutions that operate outside the confines of the market and the state. Known variously as the 'non-governmental organisations' (NGOs), 'Civil Society' or 'third' sector, this set of institutions includes within it a wide array of entities – hospitals, universities, professional organisations, human rights organisations, job training centres and many more.

A growing number of political leaders, community activists and international donors have come to see such civil society organisations as strategically important participants in the search for a middle way between sole reliance either on the market or on the state. In fact, even governments are now increasingly viewing NGOs as an integral part of the institutional structure particularly for addressing the poverty problem. This is reflected in the poverty reduction strategy put in action by governments in most developing countries in Asia and now increasingly so in Africa.

But what is the link between civil society and poverty alleviation? And what role can NGOs play to help tackle the problem of poverty?

Potentially, NGOs, both local and international, can respond to the growing problem of poverty in a number of ways. Their responses can be categorised into the following: advocacy, social mobilisation, delivery of social services, providing livelihood programmes, training and relief and rehabilitation.7

NGOs, through advocacy, can potentially play a very significant role in influencing economic and political policies that have an impact upon the poorer sections of population. The agents of an active civil society, for example, can: give useful input on the thrust and design of economic policies; bring specific issues of social concern such as the environment, labour rights, gender equality and public health into the public spotlight. In some cases even help to change prevailing social norms; contribute to greater transparency and accountability and thereby curtail patronage, powerful special interests and corruption; ensuring that government policies are carried out in the manner intended and thereby significantly contribute to good governance.

Civil society can mobilise the masses, empower them and give them a "voice", supplement government in the provision of services, particularly social services, design and implement income generating programmes and micro-credit, improve community skills through technical/vocational and entrepreneurial training, and perform relief and rehabilitation functions. Another, albeit often overlooked, contribution of civil society groups to poverty alleviation is as a potential source of financial support to carry out various development programmes. A lot of the work undertaken by the NGOs is on a self-help basis and financed by philanthropic contributions, a source which otherwise would have perhaps remained untapped.

In conclusion, civil society organisations can potentially play an important role in poverty alleviation in developing countries.

2.4. DECENTRALISATION AND LOCAL GOVERNANCE IN AFRICA

One of the major findings of the Fifth African Governance Forum, is that the fundamental challenge for good governance in Africa is to strengthen the political will in support of decentralisation. The first step in this direction would be for leaders of the African countries to show their real commitment to decentralise. In many African countries, clear constitutional principles as well as legislative and regulatory frameworks, which are key for decentralisation, are not yet in place. Other major constraints to effective political participation by the citizenry include: scarcity of resources, poorly trained cadres at the local government level, intra-partisan rivalries and non-responsive political parties, weak governance structures to control corruption and to promote accountability and transparency, and inadequate attention of local authorities to the importance of decentralisation.8

But if we analyse the situation in Africa, most of the important prerequisites for successful decentralisation are almost non-existent or in the very early stages of development, especially considering that some countries are emerging or have just emerged from conflict or crisis. Which are then the imperatives and reasons for decentralisation in Africa?

For a long time, worsening poverty levels in Africa were explained in terms of poor economic performance. Emerging evidence, however, shows that economic growth alone is not sufficient to bring about, in a sustainable way, the needed reduction in poverty. In fact for some African countries, GDP growth has come hand in hand with worsening social indicators, validating an established fact that while economic growth is important for poverty alleviation, particularly in the medium and long term, it is definitely not sufficient by itself. In the African context, the lack of responsiveness of poverty to the economic stimulus is attributed in part to problems with governance, especially at the local level.9

In pro-poor interventions, one of the primary hurdles is how to effectively target the poor. Proper targeting has generally proved to be elusive. The other challenge is how best to ensure that there is local ownership of the interventions. These considerations bring to the fore the issues of local governance. One of the lessons from past failures of poverty-focussed interventions is the importance of avoiding a 'top down' approach to project design and implementation as this invariably results in ineffectiveness of the interventions.10

Also, concerns regarding central administrative capacity, fiscal constraints and the limited accountability at all levels of government have led African leaders to place increased emphasis on the importance of decentralisation and developing local governance capacities. The other supporting argument for decentralisation is the need for improved government effectiveness in the delivery of goods and services and revenue collection.

External pressure by funding agencies like the World Bank, UN etc. have also been important motivations for decentralisation in many countries.11

Furthermore, a good number of African countries see decentralisation as a solution not only to the enhancement of the state's capacity to accelerate local development but also as a way to enhance the voice and power of the poor in the continuing fight against poverty. On the political side, decentralisation has been opted for as a solution to political challenges that seem to threaten national cohesion. Countries with a history of tensions (linguistic, ethnic/tribal, religious) have often found the federal approach to national governance as most suitable. Central politicians also tend to support decentralisation to appeal to voters and win elections as a means of undercutting the power base of rivals.12

However, despite the political and developmental motivations, decentralisation is perhaps much more of a challenge in Africa than elsewhere in the world. It is, therefore, important that there is consensus on the decentralisation policy, which is not centrally or donor driven, and which has a holistic framework, focussing on all levels of government and civil society simultaneously. It should be based on improving the enabling environment and building capacities and not on projects. The need for immediate success and quick results can lead to quick fixes, which are unsustainable. As such, it is important that decentralisation is viewed with a long-term perspective. African leadership will have to demonstrate patience and uninterrupted and determined commitment for the successful implementation of decentralisation in the continent.

2.5. ELEMENTS FOR EFFECTIVE LOCAL GOVERNANCE – DECENTRALISATION POLICIES

Given the above, capacity development - that will enable participation of key stakeholders - is crucial to achieving sustainable development. Experience has shown that there is a gap between existing capacities and demand for services and accountability at the local level. This situation calls for the creation of awareness, clear articulation of roles, and harnessing of the potentials of the different actors involved.

Decentralisation policies sometimes call for establishing new structures, participatory mechanisms and accountability systems. However, the option of strengthening existing traditional structures should not be totally discounted.

According to studies and analysis conducted in several countries, for effective local governance decentralisation policies, strategies, legal frameworks, programmes and activities should be conceived from two planes13:

– The vertical plane: involving the transfer of authority functions, responsibilities and resources from central government to local government;

– The horizontal plane: involving the empowerment of grass-root communities to enable them to determine, plan, manage and implement their own socio-politico-economic development.

While vertical decentralisation requires shifts in central government policy, laws as well as institutional and structural arrangements to provide for the sharing of powers, authority functions and resources and enable local governments to perform fully, horizontal decentralisation may take place without necessarily making adjustments in the laws. However it requires determined mobilisation and organisation of local communities to participate fully in the planning and implementation of socio-economic activities that are aimed at strengthening their capacity to determine and enjoy their livelihood.

An important linkage between vertical and horizontal decentralisation is that in countries used to highly centralised governments and/or dictatorships, horizontal decentralisation empowers local populations and prepares them to be able to positively receive and utilise the powers, authority and resources transferred to them via the vertical decentralisation.

It is always of great use to engineer efforts of decentralisation on the two planes involving all stakeholders: horizontal decentralisation will empower local communities and, vertical decentralisation will create conducive structural arrangements and transfer of powers, functions, responsibilities and resources that will supplement the empowerment created by vertical decentralisation.

Conceiving the two planes of decentralisation is also useful in the situation where the debate and agreement on formal vertical decentralisation, involving the transfer of powers, authority, functions, and resources from central government to local governments, for various reasons takes a long time. In such cases it is possible and advisable to start on programmes, projects and activities that empower local communities via, for example, NGOs or Community Based Organisations (CBOs).14

In conclusion, based on the experiences and lessons learned in this field by eminent experts and practioners, the key policy messages and recommendations for local governance-decentralisation, or Decentralised Governance, can be summarised as follows:

1. Decentralised governance for poverty reduction is a long-term learning and development process that requires a sustained commitment from, co-ordination of, and strengthened capacities of all stakeholders at various levels;

2. At the national/central level, there must be an enabling environment to ensure that devolution of authority/power to the local level would succeed for community empowerment;

3. For decentralisation to contribute to poverty reduction, it is necessary to give due attention to administrative and fiscal decentralisation and not just to political decentralisation;

4. For decentralisation to be effective, adequate emphasis should be placed on ensuring participatory monitoring and evaluation at all levels;

5. Decentralisation initiatives should not be prescriptive, but instead take into account the specific contexts (e. g. local cultures).15 Moreover, a specific framework incentives-focused able to motivate local people should be established.

Notes

1. Report of the Capacity Development Workshop on "Decentralized Governance and Poverty Reduction", organized by UNDP, during the 4th Global Forum on Re-inventing Government - Citizens, Businesses and Governments: Dialogue and partnerships for Development and Democracy, Marrakech, Morocco, 10-13 December 2002, UN, New York 2002. www.unpan.org-www.globalforum.ma

2. UNDP, Human Development Report – 2003, "Millennium Development Goals: A compact among nations to end human poverty", UN, NY, 2003.

3. Report of the workshop on Poverty Alleviation and Decentralisation for ten West African countries, jointly organised by UNDESA and the Government of Senegal, Dakar, July, 2003.

4. Mani, Presentation to the workshop on Poverty Alleviation and Decentralisation for ten West African countries, organised jointly by UNDESA and the Government of Senegal, Dakar, July, 2003.

5. Katsiaouni, Presentation to the workshop on Poverty Alleviation and Decentralisation for ten West African countries, jointly organised by UNDESA and the Government of Senegal, Dakar, July, 2003.

6. Khan and Katsiaouni, Presentation to the workshop on Poverty Alleviation and Decentralisation for ten West African countries, jointly organised by UNDESA and the Government of Senegal, Dakar, July, 2003.

7. Adablah and Mani, Presentation to the workshop on Poverty Alleviation and Decentralisation for ten West African countries, jointly organised by UNDESA and the Government of Senegal, Dakar, July, 2003.

8. Fifth African Governance Forum (AGFV), "Local Governance for Poverty Reduction in Africa", Maputo, Mozambique, 23-25 May 2002.

9. Kemo Conteh and Sheikh E.T Lewis, "Decentralization and Civil Society approaches as means of improving governance and poverty reduction: The Gambia Experience"; and Sao-Kpato Max-Kyne and Abu Brima "Sierra Leone's experience with decentralization as a means to improve governance and combat poverty", 2003.

10. Aliyu Dr. Abdullahi, "Nigerian experience of decentralization as a mean to improve governance and how it contributes to combating poverty", 2003.

11. Adablah, Presentation to the workshop on Poverty Alleviation and Decentralization for ten West African countries, organized jointly by UNDESA and the Government of Senegal, Dakar, July, 2003.

12. Gyan-Baffour Prof. George, "Decentralisation as a means to improve governance and poverty reduction: Experience from Ghana", 2003.

13. Kauzya John-Mary, "Local Governance Capacity Building for Full Range Participation: Concepts, Framewoeks, and Experiences in African Countries"; Background Paper of the 4th. Global Forum on Re-inventing Government - Citizens, Businesses and Governments: Dialogue and partnerships for Development and Democracy, Marrakech, Morocco, 10th.-13th. December, 2002, UN, New York 2002. www.unpan.org -www.globalforum.ma

14. Kauzya John-Mary, idem.

15. Report of the Capacity Development Workshop on "Decentralized Governance and Poverty Reduction", organized by UNDP, during the 4th. Global Forum on Re-inventing Government - Citizens, Businesses and Governments: Dialogue and partnerships for Development and Democracy, Marrakech, Morocco, 10th.-13th. December, 2002, UN, New York 2002. www.unpan.org - www.globalforum.ma

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3
FROM e-GOVERNMENT TO e-GOVERNANCE: A PARADIGMATIC SHIFT

3.1. ICTS AS A TOOL FOR DEVELOPMENT

The debate regarding the effectiveness of using ICTs to help achieve development goals arises not only around questions concerning the evidence in support of the relationship between ICTs and development, but also more substantially from inherent doubts about the relevance of ICTs in achieving sustainable development, and fears that investment in ICTs will draw resources away from traditional development goals.

ICTs instead can be a powerful tool for development, both because of their inherent characteristics and the mounting empirical evidence that suggest they can, in fact, contribute a great deal to development goals. They can do so at both micro and national levels by increasing the effectiveness and reach of development interventions, enhancing good governance and lowering the costs of service delivery. Moreover, the right complement of targeted ICTs interventions has the potential to play an even more substantial role in accelerating a sustainable dynamic of social and economic development in developing countries.1

Therefore, it should be clear from the outset that ICTs are not a panacea for the problems of the developing world. Social and economic development is dependent upon many factors which should be addressed through an overall development strategy. Factors such as political stability, macroeconomic governance, transparency and accountability of national and local administrations, the rule of law, physical infrastructure (for example, clean water and energy), and basic literacy should also be addressed in an explicit manner, and ICTs should not be seen as a substitute.

However, the integration of ICTs into overall national development strategies can help facilitate implementation, expand scope and coverage and increase the results for most of these factors. Moreover, development goals cannot be achieved by government efforts alone. The involvement of civil society and the private sector is crucial, and ICTs can help the different stakeholders to be aware, provide and exchange information and communicate among each other.

This is much more important if we consider that full and effective participation in the emerging global information network is of fundamental importance for a country that wants to avoid marginalisation from the globalisation process and is essential for the full participation of its citizens in all spheres of life. ICTs can contribute to the integration of developed and developing countries in the world economy, and it can create the conditions for information and knowledge exchange and utilisation. ICTs offer tremendous potential to raise standards of living and enlarge opportunities for individuals, communities, countries and regions. While many in the world still remain directly untouched by the information revolution, one cannot deny the transformative effect they have already had on our global society.

3.2. e-GOVERNMENT: BENEFITS AND RISKS

Conventional use of the prefix "e" suggests that an activity is electronic or digital in nature. By accepting this, e-government would simply refer to the use of electronic information and communications technologies in undertaking all kind of government activities, in education, health, agriculture, governance, customs, etc. However, this does not reflect the value that the use of ICTs can actually add to a government's ability to foster development.

E-government can support broad public sector reforms and good governance through the introduction of innovative and sustainable applications of ICTs both within government administrations, as well as in their interaction with citizens and the private sector.

Therefore, the key word in e-government is not electronic, but government.

E-government should be regarded as an alternative and complementary approach to government administration and service delivery, as well as a means to redefine the way it interacts with citizens and the private sector. Analogous to e-business, which allows businesses to transact with each other more efficiently (B2B) and brings customers closer to businesses (B2C), e-government applications can affect the interaction and transaction between inter-agency government relationships (G2G), government and business enterprises (G2B), and government and citizens (G2C), in a more friendly, convenient, transparent and inexpensive way.2

In this sense "e" means:

– efficiency: Governments should use ICTs to minimise transaction costs and streamline their bureaucratic procedures, making their operations more efficient, freeing up resources that enable them to deliver services in a better-organised and economical manner.

– effectiveness: Governments can achieve better results and meet development goals by using ICTs to increase the relevancy of the policy formulation process through increased participation, improve the process of resource allocation, respond timely to citizens' needs and increase coverage and quality of their services.

– empowerment: ICTs can support increased interaction between citizens and their governments, for citizens both to participate in the decision making process and to become more aware of their personal and community development.

– economic and social development: Beyond the economic benefits that accrue to government due to efficiency and effectiveness gains, the use of ICTs in government and in its interaction with the business community and citizens can create new businesses, attract investments and generate employment.3

The possible impact of some e-government applications can be divided into three main dimensions of policy objectives: the economic dimension, the social dimension and the governance dimension.

On the economic side, these range from reduced transaction costs to better capacity to target services, increased coverage and quality of service delivery, enhanced response capacity to address issues of poverty and increase in revenue. Other benefits, less often considered in selecting applications, include the intended economic spin-offs that e-government may bring to the business sector, which can then become more competitive in the national and international environment. Lower transaction costs and simplified procedures will translate into comparative advantages by the private sector. In the same way, increased interaction or transactionability with government can help create new businesses. Furthermore, economic benefits may also derive from increased accountability and transparency, which may greatly reduce the risk of corruption and raise the perception of good government among citizens. Citizens' trust in their government may have an impact on their willingness to invest and to pay taxes and levies for services.

Social benefits are considerable and range from employment creation in the third sector, to improvements in the education and health system, from better targeting of the government's services, to increased capacity for the provision of safety and security. In the majority of cases these benefits can be evaluated in political terms and quantified in financial terms.4

In other words, appropriate e-government initiatives can lead to strengthened conditions for good governance. Development of e-government is therefore not only a technical issue but also a political one.

As e-government applications can differ in the way they have an impact on, and provide benefits to, the society at large, governments should review the alternatives at their disposal to optimise the use of their resources according to the country's priorities. In this view, "e-government is about the transformation of government, and it may well be the biggest transformation since the democratic revolution of the late 18th. century. Nevertheless, as with all revolutions, many outcomes are possible. ICTs are very likely to lead to more efficient service delivery. It is not clear that they will lead to a form of government that is more open, transparent, accountable or democratic than conventional government"5.

Addressing such issues poses many challenges: meeting them requires leadership that is committed, informed and engaged, especially at the political level. A firm commitment from decision makers to think through the issues and steer the right course is critical, otherwise it risks to be just a wishful claim useful only for political purpose. Providing such leadership might be the single biggest challenge on the horizon. In fact, in one form or another, e-government will come; but what is important is which kind of government it will be in the digital era. This involves a broader vision of government systems which includes and integrates the three major aspects of e-government:

– Improving service delivery;

– Improving information management;

– Improving accessibility and participation of the different stakeholders.

These three aspects of e-government provide a starting point and, in analysing them, it has to be considered that they are interconnected and interdependent. Therefore, it is necessary to think about the integration of ICTs in the government through a holistic approach, considering e-government as an integrated and evolving platform for a management system. A particular aspect, in fact, is related to the interest that different stakeholders have in how ICTs are being used to transform government. There is a growing awareness, also in developing countries, that new ICTs-networks and databases are creating a new public "infrastructure" which is the basis of e-government. They want to be sure that, as the infrastructure develops, their interests will be taken into account. This is more an more evident and enhanced with the increasing use of "peer-to-peer" systems over the Internet such as Web 2.0 applications (web blogs, communities of practices, etc) that creates ad additional communication platform often defined as Citizens to Government (C2G), and also Citizens to Politicians, and Citizens to Citizens (C2C).6

However, considering the risks of introducing e-government, it should be underlined that most e-government projects, both in industrialised and developing countries, fail either totally or partially. There are very little data about rates of success and failure of e-government projects, but some baseline estimates indicate that behind the high-tech glamour of these projects lies a dirty reality – the majority of projects are failures.7 This is due principally to the lack of "e-readiness", and the oversize gaps between project design and on-the-ground reality (known as "design-reality gaps"), meaning the lack of assessment of needs prior to the implementation of a project. These failures come at a high price for the world's poorer countries, and six categories of potential costs of e-government failure have been identified by Richard Heeks (2003):

1. Direct Financial Costs: The money invested in equipment, consultants, new facilities, training programmes, etc;

2. Indirect Financial Costs: The money invested in the time and effort of public servants involved;

3. Opportunity Costs: The better ways in which that money could have been spent, if it had not been spent on the e-government failure;

4. Political Costs: The loss of 'face' and loss of image for individuals, organisations and nations involved in failure;

5. Beneficiary Costs: The loss of benefits that a successful e-government project would have brought;

6. Future Costs: An e-government failure increases the barriers for future e-government projects. It does this in two main ways. Firstly, through the loss of morale of stakeholders, particularly e-government champions, who may 'defect' to the private sector or overseas. Secondly, through the loss of credibility and loss of trust in e-government as an approach to change. This increases risk adversion in some stakeholders and provides support for others with vested interests in the status quo.

A key problem among e-government practitioners and policy-makers is a lack of awareness of these costs. Most costs are intangible; few are ever measured in the event of e-government failure; e-government failures are often hushed up. This may explain why, despite the high costs of failure and the high prevalence of failure, many officials and politicians are still very keen on e-government.8 Here, though, we must recognise this high cost of failure, and look for ways to reduce risks. We should therefore understand which are the external and internal barriers to e-government9 and what are the needs and challenges to overcome failures and successfully implement e-government. This will be addressed in the following paragraphs.

3.3. IMPLEMENTING E-GOVERNMENT: NEEDS AND OBSTACLES

There is no single established way, no "best practice" that would lead to successful e-government. Whilst in broad terms the elements for success are already known,10 their interpretation and application must be invented locally. However, it cannot be stressed strongly enough that if a public administration does cross the "digital divide", it opens endless opportunities that are practically inaccessible by any other means. This is true for all public administrations in the world, regardless of the level of economic development, human capacities, and the social and cultural context prevailing in the community or country concerned11.

Solutions to development often require changes in government processes. Internally derived objectives for change generally tend to focus on economic benefits and on the improvement of effectiveness and efficiency in the provision of services. On the other hand, increased public demands calling for democratic participation, accountability, transparency and quality and speed of service delivery can be an important driving force for change.

To establish an e-government system countries need to embark upon a significant transformation process, particularly in those nations where aspects of good governance are yet to be strengthened. A genuine commitment from government leaders, the private sector and other institutions of the civil society is required to create leverages, benefit from synergies and sustain this transformation within the national development process. Experience has shown, in fact, that the introduction of e-government was either a consequence of sound public sector reforms, directed towards the improvement of governance conditions, or a catalyst for their introduction.

Institutional capacity development in areas such as policy development, public sector reform, legal and regulatory frameworks, strategic planning and change management, as well as co-ordination of intergovernmental relations will be required to harmonise the transformation process with the existing development objectives and facilitate the exchange of information between the different entities that compose the governance system. Furthermore, building a positive perception about the value of ICTs within government and society at large should be regarded as a priority.

Countries should carefully plan their e-government strategic goals, implementation timeframes and resources, vis-à-vis obstacles and risks to be overcome, to ensure the success of this process. Particularly during the start-up phase, lessons learned by other countries that have been at the forefront of e-government should help avoid the costly trial and error approach.

The following initial steps have been identified to guide countries within the framework in which e-government is carried out:

– Formulation of an environmental analysis (e-government Readiness);

– Elaboration of the long-term vision, including the expected contribution to development foreseen by e-government;

– Formulation of the strategic goals being pursued;

– Identification of the priorities and expected impact.12

E-government requires a conducive environment to maximise its potential. Before defining an e-government strategy or plan of action, a thorough analysis of the existing environment in which e-government will be implemented is required. Government can pose itself some key questions in order to assess how strategically prepared it is for e-government.

As indicated before, a country level of "e-readiness" is the degree to which each country is prepared for the introduction of e-government. By assessing the relative advancement in the areas that are most critical for e-government adoption by different key factors, countries would be in a better position to evaluate opportunities and challenges, as well as their own strengths and weaknesses.

However, as uniformity across the border is impossible, the objective of the e-readiness analysis is to identify specific actions for improvements and potential niches for the initial start up of e-government programmes, rather than a positive or negative answer to e-government as a whole. The following areas and key factors should be carefully analysed in order to examine the risks and assess the obstacles that may need to be overcome before entering into e-government.

a) Political conditions and leadership: Good governance, as a condition for sustainable development, requires genuine commitment from political leaders, the private sector and organisations of civil society. In the same way, the introduction of e-government in society requires strong political will to see through the transformation process it implies to government both in its internal operations as well as with regard to its interaction with civil society.

b) Regulatory framework: A proper regulatory framework is needed in order to enable secure information exchanges within government and between government, citizens and businesses. It is also needed to create the economic conditions for accessible ICTs infrastructures, services and equipment;

c) Organisational conditions: International experience shows that the introduction of e-government calls for and causes profound and evolutionary change of the institutional arrangements. To guide this transformation process, appropriate management and co-ordination mechanisms are needed;

d) Cultural and human resources conditions: Positive attitudes, knowledge and skills need to be in place – especially within the public sector – to initiate, implement and sustain e-government. Cultural aspects may cause general resistance to change and information-sharing. Inadequate human resource capacity may lead to lack of customer-orientation and overall commitment.

e) Financial conditions: The initial costs related to implementing e-government can be considerable and governments may have limited capacity to bridge the period between the initial investment and returns. Proper resource planning and access to innovative financing mechanisms are critical for e-government sustainability.

f) Communication environment: in today's world, communicating with citizens is a duty and a necessity for governments. E-government needs to be accepted and understood by all stakeholders to ensure that its benefits flow to the society as a whole.

g) Technological Infrastructure: Lack of technologies is a major bottleneck for countries aiming to implement and maintain e-government. Legacy systems may also represent considerable obstacles to change. The demographic and geographic conditions of different areas, accompanied by the distribution of economic activities, may also represent a strong bias in the rollout of ICTs infrastructure if left to the market alone.

h) Data and information systems: Management systems, records and work processes must be in place to provide the necessary data to support the move to e-government.

Countries should update the environmental analysis on a regular basis to reassess their readiness against technological progress and ongoing changes in the governance system. At different stages of e-government maturity, the relative importance of environmental areas and key factors may differ. The stages of e-government maturity allude to13:

a) full digital data availability, when all government data processing operations in its multitude of institutions are done in digital form and data can move among different operating platforms;

b) e-publishing, when all these institutions are posting their relevant information online, in an organised and easily accessible way to other government agencies, businesses and citizens;

c) e-interaction, when all relevant interactions, including participation in policy analysis and formulation, can take place online between government agencies, as well as between government and business and government and citizens;

d) e-transaction, when all relevant transactions between government agencies and between these agencies and the private sector businesses and citizens can take place online;

e) transformed government, when government has gone through the full transformation process, providing fully integrated services requiring broad organisational change, aligning its organisational set-up with the new capacities it has acquired as a 'digital state'.

The different stages of e-government maturity are closely linked to the successive phases of ICTs implementation at the institutional level. Over time, individual government agencies are expected to go through similar phases.

The speed by which a country will be able to move from one stage of e-government maturity to the other is highly dependent on political leadership and the human and financial resources it can rely on, as well as on the capacity of different institutions to move through their successive phases.

The above does not imply that a country can only move from one phase to the other if all government institutions have met the criteria for that particular phase. On the contrary, to a certain extent, asymmetry will almost by definition occur. Especially in the first phases, individual agencies can move relatively independently although co-operation with an increasing number of other institutions will be required to move into more advanced phases of the e-government process.

Countries should define e-government priorities within the framework of their national policy goals, e-government vision and strategic objectives by evaluating the way different applications draw on scarce available resources and add different value to and impact on the governance process.

E-government tends to be multidimensional, impacting above all on economic, social and governance dimensions. The prioritisation process should focus on these impacts from a people-centred and development-oriented perspective. From the start a participatory approach should therefore be stimulated and guidance provided to ensure that different stakeholders and institutions start discussing the different available options. Experience has also shown that e-government cannot be introduced through a single major initiative but rather through small, achievable components which can build success and credibility. This is what is increasingly be used as the "Think-big, Start-small, Scale fast" approach used in many success stories (or claimed to be so).

In this regard, many examples of "Think-big and start small" exist, but there are not many examples of successful "Scale fast" experiences, despite the political claims on this.

In fact, achieving the future as envisaged by the policy-makers necessitates an incremental and modular basis implementation, a building block approach that allows for greater control and flexibility of the process, particularly during the initial phase. The focus could therefore be placed on priorities that could create an enabling environment for successive stages of e-government maturity. For instance, the ability to facilitate communication and co-ordination of activities among major partner institutions could be one of the main deliverables that is sought after. This kind of priority may involve initially very little technology since the focus would be more on reaching agreement on standardisation of key data sets which could enable linking the information bases of individual partners.

Among the most important criteria to determine their set of priorities, countries should include sustainability, the rate of return in terms of social and economic benefits and the potential spin-offs that e-government applications can generate. In fact, understanding the 'market' in which institutions operate, the social and economic impact and the potential spin-offs is of critical importance in determining how the required inputs could be met by and for the individual institutions.

Overall, however, the impact of e-government on the economic, social and governance spheres is still considered the main determining factor in the prioritisation process and in establishing the level of support that governments will provide.

In this regard, it is important that a clear, strategic vision of what a government aims to achieve through e-government will be generated to guide the transformation process. This may encompass a systemwide perspective, for example at the central government level, or be limited to a specific sector of government administration. This vision has to take into account the national and local development needs and opportunities, as well as the conditions facing the government system or specific sectors.

The vision of e-government for development needs to be aligned with national development strategies and plans, in particular with the national ICTs strategy and governance reform goals. As different political contexts and development needs have to be brought together in one vision, leadership should recognise that a consultative process with all stakeholders is necessary to form consensus.

The vision is a medium to long-term statement concerning broad goals, and which provides a road map and general guidance for institutional change, allowing systematic issues to be better understood and more coherently addressed. It provides a framework within which the actions and interests of different stakeholders can be brought together to ensure a common orientation that makes increments of action by various stakeholders consistent and compatible with the desired long-term goal of democracy, good governance and sustainable development.14

3.4. e-GOVERNMENT AND e-GOVERNANCE: CHALLENGES AND THREATS

The development of e-government and e-governance takes place in a very specific environment and contextual pressure which we must understand and learn, in order to steer at best. This overall change can be identified as manifold, although producing a composed impact on our lifestyle, level of wealth and relationships, inter-regionally and inter-nationally speaking.

In particular, three main aspects should be stressed, to better understand the phenomenon:

Globalisation, appears as an emerging and constantly reinforcing process. Globalisation is more than just the "mundialisation" identified by previous researchers, from Braudel to Wallerstein, rooted in Middle Age discoveries and expressed through successive expansions, themselves supported by ever more efficient communication means, up to the complete coverage and information production upon, of the planet as the ultimate cognitive object. Globalisation is the effect of this building process in the sense that its overall power relationships (let us think about conflicts or the inequalities of means and performance), but also local initiatives may have an impact instantly or gradually on the rest of the world, thanks to highly interconnected processes and interests. It is, needless to say, that ICTs reinforce this process. Globalisation can be perceived as a source of opportunities, as the scale for any activity tends to take place in a much broader arena than before, but also as a constant pressure, with positive and negative consequences.

Economic competition, as a result of the previous phenomenon, became pervasive and almost a safeguard free paradigm, with significant consequences in terms of energy and material output, nature transformation and technology mastering, but also social and knowledge divides as well as damage at various scales and severe environmental threats ahead; economic competition is believed to benefit the customer, encourage innovation at all levels and, as a consequence, generate a better society. It also generates local shifts and undesired effects, with economic, social and cultural dimensions, to which remedies must be found. Public policy and more significantly political elites and leaders in major OECD countries have set up a framework for developing competition which goes even further, changing the rules of politico-economic regimes in a serious programme trend called liberalisation.

State transformation, in this context, reinforced local means to express needs, projects and alliances in separate terms are growing in parallel with the pressure of globalisation and transnational forms of economic competitiveness; it is therefore no surprise to see the state entering a phase of redefinition. Sovereignty is often at the core of the discussion, but fundamentally, what seem to be essential state prerogatives in most regions of the globe, are being rearranged: public service delivery can often be delegated, with the necessary reinforcement of policy making and regulation capabilities towards more efficient, ethically consistent supervision of services. It is of course particularly the case in industries traditionally owned by the state in many countries (telecommunications, energy industries, transport, health, etc.), but also of more specific administrative services (let us think of geographical information systems for instance).

In fact, the numerous e-activities, e-products, and e-services which are currently being displayed in the public sector cannot be fully understood, appreciated and assessed if they are not placed within the much broader framework of state transformation15.

However, it is important to stress why. Indeed, the transformation of the state's status encompasses changes in three separate dimensions, namely:

• the growing emergence of non-state actors, basically transnational corporations (TNCs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Increasingly, the state has to share its power with these non-state actors. Such power sharing is most pronounced at the supra- and at the infra-national levels.

• The growing emergence of levels of managing public affairs, other than the nation-state level. I refer here in particular of the emergence of supra-national levels (EU, global), as well as of infra-national levels (local, regions).

• The growing differentiation of the state's three main functions, namely the service delivery function, the rule-making function and the regulatory function. These three functions can be increasingly treated as being separate from each other and therefore being shifted to the different levels and the different actors.

These three movements are being combined with each other, which leads to the fact that public affairs become more and more fragmented (in terms of functions), diluted (in terms of levels) and outsourced (to non-state actors). There is, in particular, a deficit of cross-functions, seamless operations in which non-state stakeholders can play a proactive role. At the same time, enterprise-based and private individuals' e-activities develop quite freely and increasingly. There is therefore a place for a different type of steering than the one e-government promotes. This is what I defined as governance with, and of, ICTs, or e-governance16.

But this new concept brings about a number of challenges and threats to be analysed. Some general challenges, as previously evoked are linked to the fact that e-government, just like all e-activities, tends to modify organisational boundaries, statuses and even more, to generate new risks and opportunities that were not part of the pre-Internet landscape. Some of these changes concern the networking capabilities of the organisations, their internal or shared processes, the rationale of the value-chain and even some institutional adjustments. In fact, one could say that the fully-fledged digital transformation of services, with the possible supporting incorporation of several technological innovations, almost certainly lead to institutional redesign, unless some new problems are immediately recreated (let us remember for instance the risk of an increase in the back-office distraction due to exaggeratedly accessible online services).

However, this organisational and institutional dimension of ICTs-induced changes modify in a considerable manner the issue of measuring and comparing achievements as they necessarily involve more complex changes than just efficiency or optimisation effects due to the digitisation of existing administrative services. A whole new domain of what to measure and how to do it is therefore open to exploration, much beyond the rather simple and always difficult to demonstrate reality of the "e-indexes".

Some other issues or challenges are more specific but no less important, when envisaging a more holistic perspective, such as security and identity management, mobility of actors and organisations supported by enhanced technological means and accesses, territorial and data mining-rooted surveillance and private sphere reconsideration, productivity and benefit capturing, using ICTs as a trigger for development, cultural diversity, etc.

In a more generic statement, I see e-government as very heterogeneous and having quite a number of difficulties to evaluate before, during and after projects are undertaken, with effective and sustainable cost-benefit criteria and setting priorities for high impact solutions (vs. quick wins). In addition to this, while e-government initiatives have so far reached, in many cases spectacular inroads in terms of service delivery, especially by digitising the front-office but also that in many cases are just "mirroring" the existing and not always well-restructured back-office, ICTs are so far not being systematically (or at all) used with regard to the other functions of the state (namely, regulatory and policy making). Thus, the potential of ICTs in linking the overall functions of the state and the different levels and actors involved in the governance process, is far from being realised (or in many cases even started).

Combining the above mentioned, general or more specific, challenges that e-government is confronted with, and the necessity to address these issues with a consistent toolbox and in terms of multi-actor, multi-level and multi-sector involvement, we are obliged to ask whether e-government is not forgetting some important "missing masses" in its linear, optimistic and mostly mono-factor type of deployment.

As already said before, I am fully aware that worldwide, at the moment, for most actors, e-governance is a synonym of e-government. Some scholars try to propose a perspective in which e-governance is just e-government extended to non state actors, but still with the state as the leading force in such endeavours.

The definition I proposed here is instead a radically new and fully innovative vision of e-governance where institutional redesign, state transformation, and organisational changes, as well as networking and relationship management are the key features of this new paradigm.

This conceptual framework is based on some "e-governance theses" I developed together with my colleague Pierre Rossel during the redesign and conceptualisation of the Executive Master in e-governance at EPFL (2005, 2006), and that can be summarised as follows17:

• There is a growing awareness of the need to improve the quality of public-service delivery, through new mechanisms and forms, including public-private partnerships, externalisation, delegation, etc. and with an attention to the market, the "citizen-user-customer" and the need to manage efficiently and effectively limited resources, in a time of rapid technological change. In this context, e-government is playing an important role in promoting the transformation of the state, but its value-chain, and the market relations between suppliers and providers are demonstrating its limits, and actually even provoke risks, especially in not well established democracies, or in less developed countries. E-government is therefore becoming an "industry" in itself, with a complex system of relationships that need to be managed and governed. But what have to be governed are not only the solutions to collective problems but the manner of collectively constructing the Information Society.

• Rapid technological change induces organisational changes and these result in a continuous "dynamic tension" that generates pressure for institutional change and new needs in the society that cannot always be satisfied, controlled or even followed by the state. These needs of change cannot be governed or decided by a static decision making process and often go beyond the rigid existing regulatory frameworks, but need innovative solutions involving all stakeholders. ICTs add complexity and increase the speed of change. In the same way as governance is about collective problem solving, but unlike the state, not necessarily or not only in a vertical or hierarchical way; e-governance is therefore collective problem-solving not only with the use of ICTs, but also of the ICTs. It is also about innovating, to solve some problems that cannot be solved the usual way and, if necessary, it is finally about changing the institutional rules, processes, configurations or boundaries or even inventing new ones, e-governance is also a new form of social engineering. Non-state actors are not just citizens or users of the administration, they are stakeholders of problems that require attention or solutions, these problems are quite diverse and have to cope with many possible industrial domains. Once again, more than just problems (to be solved collectively) they are actors in the building of the Information Society.

• E-governance is more a process about the "how" than the "what". E-governance is a reflective activity in which the way problems are tackled is as important as the result and even to a great extent having an impact on the result. In this sense, accessibility, transparency, evaluation and accountability are features intrinsically marking a robust e-governance process, where e-government is only an instrument for better service delivery (the governance with ICTs). But ICTs, in addition to being used to perform the governance task, are multi-faceted in nature. There is at least a triple aspect to ICTs: as a tool, as a means for producing a structural effect and as a domain, all aspects of which also have to be regulated and governed as they involve many types of stakeholders. ICTs as tools explain to a large extent the governance "with" ICTs aspect of e-governance; the structural effect is largely the consequence of the impact of the many and rapidly changing technologies of the Information Society. This is difficult to measure and also largely involves policy-making and not just regulatory action; ICTs as domain cross-cut all activities and need to be regulated (e-governance as governance "of " ICTs). Most activities involve two or three of these facets, although most of the time only the first one is taken into account.

• E-governance is also a knowledge creation and management process, but at the same time it is a learning process and, as such, it must be concerned with measurement, evaluation and also foresight. The requirement therefore is to build an evaluation system that will be at the same time capable of measuring the impact of the tools (i.e. the use of ICTs or the e-government), but that can be linked to the measurement of the e-governance. This means considering the capacity of the various stakeholders points of view to appraise processes, new services or business models, and the capacity to incorporate values, diversity, openness and multi-level perspective to embed any significance, as well as foresighting about long-term impacts, rather than just the short term immediate results of introducing ICTs in a specific process. E-governance is therefore about maintaining, beyond the problem solving actions and taking into consideration what exists, the necessity to open new avenues of how to do things among stakeholders.

These theses are intended to dismiss the naïve perspective of valuing the connective aspect of the Internet as if we were from now on only part of one network. There are many networks, of different kinds, social, organisational, technological-infrastructural, and they partially interconnect, they also oppose one another and e-governance is also the negotiations, intermediations, compromises taking place and the crafting of ad hoc organisational and institutional forms to allow or maintain such half-way solutions.

Convergence of the first order, making it possible for the same type of data to flow through various channels or at least to be captured and managed as such at key points of the infrastructure networks does not make enough in terms of networking: discontinuities are essential to explain the generation of a solution, much more than the presence of connective tools.

Society, in fact, is not harmonious and just saying that e-governance, like governance, is about the transactional aspect of inter-actor life would not account for the complexity of what really takes place, it is also confrontational. Stakeholders have to muddle their way through even when they are not fundamentally friends, inter-industry-wise and inter-level-wise. This is why e-governance can be seen as the expression of a dynamic tension. As mentioned before (see Definition of e-governance) there is although a basic asymmetry between the two side of the coin that define e-governance (governance with and of): where "with" means basically "bureauatic", web-based and connective type of technologies and applications or rather the said mediation-supportive technologies and applications; whereas governance of ICTs means dealing in terms of innovation and regulation with all the technologies of the Information society.

3.5. FROM e-GOVERNMENT TO e-GOVERNANCE: THE WAY TOWARDS A KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY

The need to respond to changing pressures resulting from globalisation, fiscal demands, evolving societies and citizens' expectations has meant a continuing process of public administration reform to enhance performance, both in industrialised and developing countries, notwithstanding significant changes over the last two decades. Reforms have addressed (and are addressing, especially under the guidance of the UN MDGs) the full range of good governance objectives. In many areas, ICTs have been an important enabling tool for reform. While the pursuit of efficiency gains and the effective delivery of programme outcomes have been main drivers of ICTs use in government, governments are now confronted with a new reality and changed imperatives as a result of the diffusion of ICTs throughout the world and within their nations. The focus has turned more recently to other good governance objectives, such as facilitating consultation and public engagement to respond to standards of accountability, transparency and participatory governance as critical elements for democracy and state legitimacy.18

In this framework, ICTs allow a government's internal and external communication to gain speed, precision, simplicity, outreach and networking capacity. This can be converted into cost reductions and increased effectiveness – two desired features of all government operations, but especially of public services. It can also be converted into 24 hour 7 days a week usefulness, transparency and accountability, networked structures of public administration, information management and eventually knowledge creation.

But what is now becoming more important is that, in addition to this, ICTs can equip people for genuine participation in an inclusive political process that can produce well-informed public consent, the ever more prevalent basis for the legitimacy of governments.19

This demands a fundamental change in the way the state acts internally and interacts with its citizenry, particularly in its function of promoting good governance as a condition for sustainable development. E-government can transform the existing government structure and consolidate the establishment of an inclusive governance system, through digital means, that is capable of exercising its powers and functions efficiently and effectively. It can produce a governance system that is committed to working with civil society in a transparent and accountable way to reduce poverty, safeguard the environment, redress inequality, foster security and fulfill social, economic, cultural, civic and political rights.20 In other words, governance, in combination with ICTs, is making its way towards "e-governance", where - as we have seen before - the concept of e-governance further encompasses the concept of e-government. E-governance, in fact, involves not only the use of ICTs, but also a new way of looking at, and attitude to, governing and managing ICTs, where participation and efficiency are required of all the partners linked in a network21.

While e-government may be understood as the performance of the governance systems via the electronic medium in order to facilitate an efficient, speedy and transparent process of disseminating information to the public and other agencies, and for performing government administration activities, e-governance is generally considered as a wider concept than e-government, since it can bring about a change in the way citizens relate to governments and to each other. For someone, the idea of adopting ICTs in governance is to move beyond passive information-giving to active citizen involvement in the decision making process22.

The purpose of implementing e-governance, is seen not only to enhance good governance, but to take advantage of the recent advances in ICTs, and especially the Internet, to provide opportunities to transform the relationship between governments and citizens in a new way, bringing forth new concepts of citizenship, both in terms of citizen needs and responsibilities. The use of ICTs, in fact, can increase the broad involvement of citizens in the process of governance at all levels by providing the possibility of online discussion groups and by enhancing the rapid development and effectiveness of pressure groups. The government should gain in that through the provision of better service in terms of time it makes governance more efficient and more effective. In addition, the transaction costs can be lowered and government services become more accessible, while it can engage, enable and empower the citizen.

However, for this to be a reality, it is required not only to define new ways of organising and delivering information and services, but a new style of leadership, new ways of debating and deciding policy and investment, new ways of accessing education, new ways of listening to citizens, and at the same time providing adequate and innovative regulatory frameworks.

Within this context, e-governance is also necessarily about the improvement of the performance of civil servants to provide better services to citizens. In principle, it has the potential to enhance decentralisation, accountability and transparency, and can thereby improve the position of developing countries in the global political economy.

However, recent studies have found vast differences between countries in the maturity of their e-government efforts. Perhaps the key findings, is that even the most mature countries have tapped less than 20% of the potential.23 Furthermore, the results of the UN Global e-government Survey 2003, identify that: "only very few governments have opted to use e-government applications for transactional services or networking; and even fewer governments use it to support the genuine participation of citizens in politics. Those who do, in most cases, apply it at a very rudimentary level".

On the other hand, one of the main findings of the UN Global e-government Survey 2003 was that: "No country or group of countries in the world owns the monopoly on imagination, wisdom and commitment or political will for use of e-government for the delivery of the public value of human development. Original, advanced content of e-government applications finds a home in the geographic and developmental South, as it does in the North".

Analogous to the development of e-commerce in the private sector (which has evolved already through several stages: from publishing, through interactivity, completing transactions, and delivery, and it has now been overtaken, at least in some areas, by the so called "economy", that involves the creation and use of "e-marketplace" instead of e-procurement relations) e-government has so far centred its activity on publishing, but, in many cases, it is evolving quickly through the different stages of e-government maturity. Thus, if we consider the same analogy, and having in mind what was underlined by the Human Development Report (2001) ".....technology networks are transforming the traditional map of development, expanding people's horizons and creating the potential to realise in a decade progress that required generations in the past....."24 developing countries could benefit from the progress made in the sector of ICTs application to accomplish government tasks and service delivery, and reaching the "e-marketplace" solution immediately, without passing through the "e-procurement" applications, in a sort of "leapfrogging" paradigm, still far to be effectively realised, despite the potential and the political discourses about it.

Obviously, this new participatory approach in running governance affairs has to be developed - and not only in the developing countries - considering the barriers and threats to its implementation, being viewed as a complex process, articulated over time, embracing the overall system in which governments operate and interact with individuals, organisations and communities to perform their functions, achieving public ends by digital means25.

In general terms, the debate regarding e-governance is most often polarised between those who feel that the new ICTs will enhance participation by the citizen in the government policy decision making process and those who feel that it will simply be business as usual via a new medium. The arguments range from a promise that the new ICTs will completely revitalise democracy, giving more power to the citizen, to the opposite position that it will do nothing more than enhance the existing mechanisms to deliver government services in a more efficient manner.

But, as the subjects of e-government and e-governance (with the related issues of e-Participation and e-Democracy) are in their nascent stages, there is still very little empirical data to support either side of these arguments26.

In spite of the criticism of technocracy, those who believe in the success of e-governance argue that further development of information systems will contribute to overcoming bureaucratic contradictions within government27. At the same time, this will also allow the enhancement of the economic performance of developing countries, more through the creation/strengthening of an ICTs industry, than through the easier access of the private sector to crucial public sector information, and the increase of "capacity for public service delivery of basic social services, public administration reform, integrated planning, increased citizen participation in decision making, decentralisation, transparency, accountability and combating corruption".28

Despite this optimistic approach, somewhat induced by an ICTs-driven positivistic philosophy, as I have already underlined before, and in this comforted by the evidence of fieldwork and analysis that try to go beyond the "supply side" indicators available in the front-office, entering into the back-office and looking at the "demand-side" indicators, the potential for e-government and e-governance in both industrialized and developing countries, remains largely unexploited29. This is perhaps because of the difficulty in achieving the revised organizational structures and skills; degree of decentralization of decision making; new forms of leadership; transformation toward public-private partnerships; and effective involvement of stakeholders, that is required. Moreover, local governance is in general given little attention within national e-government policies and strategies. In this regard, the broad assumption that the use of ICTs can greatly increase good governance has yet to be proven. To date there is little empirical evidence of the "multidimensional" effects of ICTs on governance, which can in turn inform national e-government policies.

Furthermore, and more important, if we consider the large amount of money wasted for e-government for Development initiatives that, in some cases, have been criticized to be a new form of market acquisition for national industries from the so called developed countries, or even new forms of "e-Colonialism..."30, I want to stress here the risks beside the opportunities of introducing ICTs in different contexts, and the need to look at the issue of development considering that, based on the conceptual framework I presented here, it is not sufficient to just introduce ICTs into Government operations to solve the problems of today's world, or even worst just transferring "best practices", as unfortunately many policymakers seems to believe.

So far, the main effort in e-government has been dedicated to the digitization of existing information and procedures, addressing in a hopefully more efficient way a variety of administrative functions and service delivery options. We have to recognise the value of this ongoing achievement. At the same time, the underpinning assumptions, methods and philosophical biases that have been used to support that type of change (that we call change I, see after) bear some cost and to some extent, prevent an easy move towards more ambitious transformation, such as suggested by the higher stages of the maturity model in particular and in any case by an effective local development involving grass-root motivations and projects. One of the reasons behind this paradoxical barrier is the success and productivity of the process-minded approach.

In this regard, the Business Process Reengineering phenomenon (or simply BPR), which has been highly fashionable throughout the nineties, was heavily convoked, directly or indirectly, to address the issue of transforming administrations with ICTs toolsets. In my opinion, however, it did so in a rather simplistic manner (although technically it can be quite sophisticated). It has been necessary to adapt the process re-engineering rationale to the characteristics of the particular process analysed, taking into consideration the peculiarities of the public sector. The challenge was to identify the different sub-processes (stages) that take place within the public sector, in particular with regard to the linkages with politics and the role of the different "clients": citizens, users, customers, other administrations and agencies, private sector, etc. and decide which process re-engineering concepts can be beneficially used in their analysis.

In fact, BPR31 is about redefining the complexity of organizations on the basis of linear and interrelated threads of action called processes, with regard to specific human resources as well as infrastructure use, hopefully leading to customers' satisfaction. The problem is that the solution is immediately perceptible and impacting the organization, but at the same time it narrows down the vision of its scope, place and options in a wider framework of inter-organizational, market or governance-minded considerations. It therefore tends to close down to similar practices, self-rewarding indicators and short-term results. In its lower-end version, BPR may have meant nothing more than some very partial process reformulation and a general excuse for undertaking severe organizational restructuring. Today new concepts have taken the relay, including more "network-minded" substance (ICTs mean more and more the involvement of the Internet in and out) than BPR, which was organization-centered, namely Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and the notion of ICTs/business process "alignment".

In this context, it has to be considered in fact that, especially in developing countries, the public sector is increasingly seen as the main engine to bridge the digital divide at country level. Public agencies can start acting as model users of ICTs and be catalysts for others to follow. The public sector tends to be the biggest provider of local content and it can nurture and foster the further development of the local ICTs industry. For this reason, the enhancement and/or building of the capacity of public bodies and government agencies in the use of e-government applications, promoting at the same time the accessibility of businesses and citizens to internet and government services online, can improve availability of information and eventually produce knowledge.

The debate is therefore now turning towards the discussion of the role of information and knowledge in public sector reform, and the role of the public sector in developing and implementing the Knowledge Society as a whole, through national policies. The role of knowledge development and governance is certainly not new. However, it has to be recognised that knowledge has taken on an even greater degree of relevance and a different shape with the advent and deepening of the knowledge economy and society. There are multiple drivers of this phenomenon, one of them being the way in which society is becoming more complex and unpredictable in both positive and challenging ways. One can point to: globalisation, the economic value of ideas, global production chains, demographics of youth, challenges to political systems and rapid development in science and technology, including ICTs as examples of this change. These new imperatives demand responses that are more creative, innovative and smarter and more active in their use of knowledge. Yet while there is an abundance of information there is a deficit of knowledge, or at least a deficit in the ability of the public sector to create, use and apply it meaningfully.

The UN Millennium Declaration, in addition to detailing a number of socio-economic and governance goals, also takes note of the importance of innovation, science and technology and knowledge as tools for meeting the Declaration's objectives. Capacity building towards these ends is called for. Guided by this philosophy, it becomes necessary to seek to determine those knowledge related activities and policy decisions that add public value and result in the meaningful utilisation of knowledge throughout the whole society. For this purpose, there is a recognisable need to translate these general goals and recommendations into more concise – though flexible – conceptual frameworks, implementable policy and concrete actions, especially taking into consideration the lessons learned to date by those around the world seeking to realise the potential of the Knowledge Society.

While the precise role of the public sector in developing national knowledge systems may be the subject of debate, there is a clear role for the public sector in enhancing its own generation, dissemination and use of knowledge and in the gathering of knowledge through public debate and citizen participation in policy making and implementation. This goes beyond mere e-government policies and seeks to place knowledge as an essential factor in improving quality, effectiveness, collaboration, multidisciplinary programmes and meaningful government reform. As such, it is important to focus not only on the tools for knowledge management, but also on the content and use of knowledge as it is found in various forms in the public sector32.

However, as I have already mentioned, access to information, while an important component of acquiring knowledge, does not in itself constitute learning33. Information is not knowledge or competence. As a matter of fact, information access and sharing, as well as expert data handling, necessitates having a lot of knowledge. Information is not the first stage towards, nor the pre-condition of knowledge, it is quite the opposite. From the same perspective, the increase of participation in the usage of ICTs is no automatic and linear step towards deep, effective, sustainable or democratic evidence. Just the opposite, one has to stress that to carry out collective learning of some significance through ICTs, more horizontal processes, empowerment and trial and error linked with experience sharing must somehow take place "upstream" or at least considered quite early on in an ICTs-based project to constitute a democratic enhancement chance.

As a matter of fact, the Internet, e-government, e-learning, etc..., do not lead in a straightforward manner to better chances and awareness among practitioners. Altogether, particularly if mishandled, wrongly put into perspective or simply shortsightedly tied with short-term, low impact efficiency goals of substituting actual processes with a digital equivalent without any further analysis of the organisation, ICTs may not be always necessarily profitable, nor e-government in all cases, lead to improvement of administration performance or service to the citizen.

The pitfall suggested above, that involves a mere digital translation of existing services, with all the technological solutions outsourced and no particular change induced in the value chain, we (Misuraca, Rossel, see op. cit.)34 call "Change I type".

The e-governance type of interactions and collective problem solving negotiation, which may involve state agencies and requires some redesign to fit the new assignments, experiments or opportunities of alliances and partnerships, we call "Change II type".

Change I is ICTs driven, Change II is basically the art of reconfiguring processes, tasks, roles and, if necessary, institutions in order to make better use of ICTs. Change I is mainly a substitution operation, Change II a new deal to enhance each stakeholder's chances. Change I is mostly an administration-focussed preoccupation, rhetorically concerned with improving the servicing of customers or users. Change II is often multi-actor, multi-level and multi-sector.

Based upon this conceptual framework and considering that any complex issue will quite quickly bring complex issues to deal with, some key areas of concern for e-governance can be identified such as: Public security development and regulation, Identity management, Risk management, not only technological, but also economic, political and social; Sustaining the motivation for innovation beyond the best or good practice trend (which aims at not always re-inventing the wheel, a goal quite noble in itself); Developing new mobility schemes for individuals and organisations, with the kind of knowledge and environments which will enable them; Cross-border applications and projects; Cross-function learning beyond the boundaries of the various network industries in which e-activities are deployed (telecoms, post, transport, energy, health, education, etc.); Territorial management for development; The various types of digital divides to be taken care of, etc.

For all these problems and, of course, many more to be identified and documented, which most of the time do not occur separately but in conjunction (the above listing in reality must be regarded as a matrix of issues), there is a need for new competence, leadership and combined efforts and learning patterns, first in projects, experiments, knowledge sharing and benchmarking as in practice up to now, but also in knowledge management and neo-institutional skills35.

E-governance is therefore first of all an open area for innovation and solution pooling, which presently seem only to be in its infancy. A lot remains to be done to really harness ICTs as tools as they should be, instead of being steered by them, as unfortunately happens too often. This appears the only way to achieve a knowledgeable and inclusive society, taking advantage of ICTs, and managing the risks deriving from them in the best way possible.

3.6. e-GOVERNANCE IN AFRICA: CHALLENGES AHEAD

Africa's experience with ICTs has unfortunately, and for the most part, taken a different path from most of the world. Poor ICTs infrastructure, combined with weak policy and regulatory frameworks, low technological penetration and unimpressive human and institutional capacity, have led to inadequate access to affordable telephones, broadcasting, computers, the Internet and efficient postal services. This has hampered the continent's ability to capitalise on ICTs as a central tool in creating new business opportunities. The combined constraints have also played a key role in creating rifts within and between nations, between sub-regional African markets, isolating them from global markets.

The contexts and institutional frameworks within African countries are changing rapidly, reflecting their commitment to the Information Society. Many reforms have been introduced and measures have been taken by policy makers and telecommunications operators. Despite these reforms, telecommunications costs are still relatively high, particularly at the local level; whereas international communications costs are relatively cheaper. This is evidence that telecommunications policies still favour international rather than national communications. Significant progress has indeed been made in the ICTs sector, and a number of African countries have embarked on policy reforms that have introduced competition and improved policy and regulatory frameworks. In fact, since 1990, approximately forty countries have initiated programmes to separate postal functions from telecommunications. Over twenty have privatised their state-owned national telephone companies. Thirty have liberalised their markets and opened up to private cellular services, and over twenty have revised their regulatory frameworks to facilitate more effective private investment. Over forty-five have at least one cellular services provider, and at least forty have achieved some level of connectivity and the presence of local full-service dialup Internet Services Providers (ISPs), even though Internet service and other advanced services are limited by scarce bandwidth.36 These developments reflect a growing belief that Africans are realising the enormous potential of ICTs as a key driver for social and economic development and poverty reduction, particularly as reforming countries are reaping the benefits through improved infrastructure, increased applications and better accessibility and affordability of ICTs infrastructure, equipment and services.

But although the foundations of integration into the Information Society have been laid, integration into the information economy remains the responsibility of the policy makers and the different development actors. In fact, in many African countries, a systematic and consistent policy to integrate ICTs into all aspects of economic and social life is yet to be formulated. The development of the telecommunications sector is far from being integrated into the overall macroeconomic framework, and it continues to reflect a sectoral approach to telecommunications policy. Even then, most of the reforms have been done without much co-ordination at the sub-regional level. The region as a whole does not have a consistent strategy to attract larger and higher quality, local and foreign capital and other resources for investment, or to remove the many barriers in order to accelerate development. In addition, one of the major developmental challenges confronting Africa is to develop the capacities, strategies, and mechanisms necessary to take full advantage of the opportunities for development offered by ICTs. Given the potential for ICTs to induce changes, many development analysts -and I am among them- believe that these instruments can play an important role in the development process.

For example, the recent trend and developments of mobile technologies, fits within this claim, obeying the principles of the underpinning approach and earlier mentioned characteristics of e-governance (generating at the same time opportunities, resources and nuisances, durable problems, which we shall examine further), but somehow now opening to new service and user-involvement perspectives (see for that Rossel, Finger and Misuraca, 2005).

Besides describing concrete trials to make e-governance real, in Africa, it is generally admitted that ICTs have the potential to help poor communities to find new ways of accelerating their development process. But this is an implicit hypothesis based upon the fact that because development is neither a linear nor unitary process, the transforming nature of ICTs can be used to catalyse rapid and sustainable economic and social development. ICTs-enabled developed countries have been able to take maximum advantage of the opportunities that these tools can offer. Therefore, poor countries and communities should be able to take advantage of these new tools to improve their capacities to create wealth and reach an improved level of development.

The fact that ICTs are increasingly integrated into the development programmes of African countries is confirmed by their prominent position in the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). Steps are being taken to gradually institutionalise ICTs tools in the economic and social system of African countries to promote more rapid integration of these countries into the global economy. However, these steps are still limited and general strategies or policies that integrate ICTs into the overall macroeconomic framework of African countries are lacking. Integration of African nations into the Information Society will require far-reaching actions that will affect all aspects of economic and social life. However, the potential exists for ICTs to be used in all fields of activity if the constraints limiting their transforming effects can be lifted. ICTs can make this contribution by helping to meet the dynamic and changing expectations of Africans for access to information on such subjects as agriculture, education, and governance, for example. As people become familiar with ICTs they discover the opportunities that these tools can offer and express their needs on the basis of the anticipated usefulness of these technologies. In other words, they anticipate the capacity of ICTs to deliver information that will solve the practical and concrete problems they face.37

Some countries and local communities have undergone substantial changes in their effort to appropriate the tools. The changes, which have occurred at the individual level and within community organisations, include capacity building, acquisition of new skills, more efficiency in community activities, and better integration of previously marginalised groups.

Therefore, it is urgent to take far-reaching actions to meet not only expectations but also to consolidate the advances that have been made in ICTs appropriation by these African communities. Challenges and problems are generally common to the whole of Africa. As identified by the e-Africa Commission of NEPAD, the main challenges for integrating ICTs in Africa can be summarised as follows38:

Leadership: Need for a Clear e-Vision; Capacity and will to lead change; Management and accountability structures;

People: Appropriate skills and attitudes available at all levels; Availability of training programmes; Entrenching a culture of increased information access and transparency; Commitment to high level team-work; Support for public service wide collaboration; Change management initiatives.

Policy: Liberalised telecommunications sector and effective regulation; Policy environment supportive of growth of ICTs adoption and use; Policy frameworks that secure freedom of information, privacy, security, intellectual property and copyright; Arresting the "brain drain".

Processes: Identification and improvement of critical processes; Process adaptable, integrated and open to innovation; Monitoring and evaluation; Identification and adoption of best practices.

Technology: Access to ICTs networks, services and equipment; Development of local content in local languages; Ensuring that programmes drive ICTs; Standard approaches to ICTs infrastructure, to ensure scalability and interoperability; Privacy and data sharing; Authentication; Building user trust.

Stakeholders and Access: Support for the need for "e"; Ownership across the board; Making information widely available to citizens; Utilising a variety of channels, including those owned and managed by the commercial and voluntary sectors (such as Kiosks and Call centres); Consideration of people with disabilities; Ensuring that any new channel live up to high consistent standards of trust, confidentiality, security and accountability (PCs, interactive TV, cell phones, telephones/mail, etc.).

A number of initiatives and projects on ICTs for development in Africa are already under way39. However, many of the projects on ICTs for development led by International Organisations focus on financing technological infrastructure and providing assistance oriented to lower tariffs. New approaches aim to incorporate socio-cultural dimensions "placing the individual at the centre of development objectives"40.

Increasingly, initiatives focussed on enhancing "local dynamics" and creativity, are being implemented, especially in rural and remote areas of the world. This is required also in order to address what has been defined the "dynamic digital divide", that is given considering not only the national "e-Readiness" capacity at a certain point in time, and how it evolves in a specific timeframe, but instead it considers various components of the digital divide, within a given context, and how they evolve in relation to the local and the global conditions41. In this context, the centrality and importance of strengthening the political and administrative frameworks in African countries is therefore pivotal. Recent developments in ICTs have however opened up Africa to exciting possibilities for public administration, in particular, and governance in general. The appropriate use of ICTs in managing public services and governing state affairs has therefore become a necessity. This is well recognised by the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and in particular by African Ministers with responsibility for the public services. The establishment of the e-Africa Commission of NEPAD, focussing on a range of areas pertinent to ICTs implementation, from policy to e-applications, as well as the identification of good governance as a focus area for capacity-building within NEPAD, reflect the importance given to building the capacity of African states to function more effectively through the use of ICTs.

But, of course, the scenario for integrating ICTs in Africa's governance is difficult and there are some technological and human barriers that threaten the exploitation of ICTs. In short, the barriers against such initiatives are summarised by the weakness of the ICTs infrastructure in Africa and the low rate of ICTs penetration in administration. Africa ranks at the bottom of world statistics not only regarding ICTs penetration, but also for other telecommunications technologies such as television and broadband. Regarding ICTs penetration in general, according to the NUA Survey, Africa has only 3.11 million users, that is miniscule as a proportion of its population. When compared with the world's other regions the digital gap is even more evident, where Asia/Pacific has 104.88, Europe 113.14, Canada and USA 167.12. The number of users in Latin America is growing, and is now at 16.45. Only the Middle East, with 2.40 millions users is in as bad a situation as Africa, although with a smaller population42. A specific barrier is also related to the weakness and marginalised role of parliaments in Africa, as highlighted by the UNECA Report on "Striving for Good Governance"43.

However, despite the many indicators showing Africa at a disadvantage, the potential for growth through integrating ICTs in the governance systems is encouraging. In particular, the key issue is how to build capacity to move towards an African knowledge-based society that will allow enhancement of the economic performance of governments and the public sector. African countries can enormously benefit from the use of ICTs for their effective development. In addition to faster management and analysis of the execution of decisions, ICTs can especially support, in the best instances, how each public administration intends to implement its activities in relation to budget allocation, and how it thinks it ought to manage performance. The introduction of digital, knowledge-based economy in Africa would have a strong impact on the life of all citizens. It can be a powerful engine for growth, competitiveness and jobs, while at the same time improving citizens' quality of life.

However, the central issue behind ICTs utilisation in Africa is not a matter of technology transfer. It has everything to do with people's empowerment and society's ability to use the technology as a facilitator for democracy, a tool for universal access to services, opportunities and resources. "Market forces or financial superpowers alone cannot solve these questions. They must be engineered within the framework of social movements' thirst for freedom, genuine development and social justice"44.

Notes

1. Khan Sarbuland, "ICTs as an instrument to Leverage the Millennium Development Goals", in ICTs for African Development, Edited by Okpaku Joseph Sr, PhD, UN ICTs Task Force, New York, 2003

2. World Bank, www.worldbank.org

3. UNDESA, Government of Italy, Ministry for Innovation and Technologies, Plan of Action – e-government for Development, 2002, www.paler-moconference2002.org www.unpan.org

4. A Comprehensive System of Indicators for Monitoring and Evaluation of e-government is being developed within the framework of the e-government for Development Initiative of UNDESA and the Italian Government www.unpan.org

5. Lenihan Donald, "Realigning Governance: from e-government to e-Democracy", Crossing Boundaries Paper, Changing Government, Volume 6, Centre for Collaborative Government, Canada

6. Web 2.0 and peer-to-per communication mechanisms are still in their infancy but are growing fast. For more about this see, among others, Glassey Olivier, (2005; 2006).

7. Estimates indicate a rate of 70-80% of e-government Projects as total or partial failure (see Heeks, R., 2003).

8. Heeks Richard, "Most eGovernment-for-Development Projects Fail: How Can Risks be Reduced?", in iGovernment Working Paper Series, No 14, eGovernment for Development Information Exchange project, co-ordinated by the University of Manchester's IDPM, funded and managed by the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation as part of the UK Department for International Development's "Building Digital Opportunities" programme. http://www.egov4dev.org/or http://www.e-devexchange.org/eGov/topic1.htm

9. On this issue see also: Breaking Barriers to eGovernment, anEU-funded project led by the Oxford Internet Institute, implemented in collaboration with Gov3 ltd and the University of Namur.

10. In this regard, both OECD and United Nations compiled a list of "Guiding Principles for Successful e-government". See OECD, e-government Studies, "The e-government Imperative", 2003, www.oecd.org (pag. 19); and United Nations, "World Public Sector Report 2003: e-government at the Crossroads", New York, 2003, www.unpan.org, (Box 3, pag. 8 and 9).

11. In this regard, see also the Results of the UN Global e-government Survey, 2003, www.unpan.org

12. Many of the operational indications reported in this paragraph are the results of activities conducted within the framework of the UNDESA, Government of Italy, Ministry for Innovation and Technologies, Plan of Action – e-government for Development Initiative, 2002, www.paler-moconference2002.org www.unpan.org

13. UNDESA, Government of Italy, Ministry for Innovation and Technologies, Plan of Action – e-government for Development, 2002, www.palermoconference2002.org. See also Gartner, from 2000; and European Commission, from 2001.

14. UNDESA, Government of Italy, Ministry for Innovation and Technologies, Plan of Action – e-government for Development, 2002, www.paler-moconference2002.org

15. On this see, Fingeret et al ii. (2004; 2005).

16. Matthias Finger, Gianluca Misuraca and Pierre Rossel, "Governance with and of ICTs: the need for new institutional design in a changing world", egov magazine, Volume II – Issue 5

17. For the e-governance theses see: Rossel, Misuraca, "Triggering the governance perspective of e-government projects: beyond mere digitization of administration services; or the Change I to Change II shift issue", Lausanne, CDM-EPFL Working Paper, 2006 (forthcoming); and also "Rossel, Finger, Misuraca, "Assessing and steering mobile e-government options: findings and indication proposals", ECEG, 2006.

18. See the United Nations Millennium Declaration, section 'Human rights, democracy and good governance'; the Monterrey Consensus, which states that 'good governance is essential for sustainable development' (Section II); and, the World Bank Development Report 2002, Chapter 5 reports that 'Good governance matters for growth and poverty reduction'.

19. United Nations, "World Public Sector Report 2003: e-government at the Crossroads", New York, 2003, www.unpan.org

20. UNDESA, Government of Italy, Ministry for Innovation and Technologies, Plan of Action – e-government for Development, 2002, www.paler-moconference2002.org

21. Misuraca Gianluca, "From e-government to e-governance: the e-Africa initiative for good governance", paper presented to the International Conferene on e-government, SITEXPO 2004, Casablanca, Morocco, 18th.-21st. February, 2004, not published.

22. www.portal-unesco.org

23. World Bank, 2002, www.worldbank.org which reports a Study by Accenture, www.accenture.com

24. UNDP, Human Development Report 2001 "Making New Technologies Work for Human Development"

25. CAFRAD, "e-Africa: Elements and Principles for a Strategic Plan of Action" - Draft Working Paper, not published, edited with the technical assistance of Gianluca Misuraca.

26. Gilbert Riley Cathia, "The Changing Role of Citizen in the e-governance & e-Democracy Equation", CceG, 2003, www.electronicgov.net

27. IDEA, Conference on "Democracy and the Information Revolution, Stockholm, June 2001, www.idea.int

28. UN Road map to good governance and democracy

29. An interesting research in this area has been carried out by RSO-Spa, LUISS Management on behalf of the European Commission within the framework of the "eGEP Project – eGovernment Economics Impact Project, see www.rso.com

30. On this see for example, Andrea Di Maio, 2002, www.gartner.com

31. It is somehow unsatisfactory to embrace all BPR approaches with one single label. Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) has provided the business world with several complementing approaches (Davenport, 1993), (Glykas, 1994), (Harrington, 1991), (Hammer, 1993), (Morris, 1993), (Ould, 1992), most of which follow five generic steps in the process of redesign (Valiris and Glykas, 1999). Starting from the original analysis of Davenport, Stoddard, Hammer and Champy applied to the private sector and being then "translated" into the public sector, BPR became a sort of discipline in its own, with several different applications and "schools". According to Kettinger, Teng and Guha (1997), there are at least 25 different BPR Methodologies, 72 Methods and 102 Tools. Different perspectives of process modelling are suggested, such as functional, behavioral, organizational and informational, pointing out the notions of agent, role and artefact (resource, transaction) as basic process modelling constructs (Curtis et al, 1992). Some of these approaches are closer to beyond-process options and stakeholder involvement than others.

32. Bertucci Guido, "Opening Remarks to the UN Ad Hoc Expert Group Meeting on Knowledge Systems for Development", UN New York, 4th.-5th. September, 2003, www.unpan.org

33. Okpaku Joseph, E-Culture, Human Culture and In-Between: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st. Century Digital World - An Address to the ITU Conference on Creating New Leaders for E-Culture, Coventry, UK, August, 2001

34. Rossel, Misuraca, "Triggering the governance perspective of e-government projects: beyond mere digitisation of administration services; or the Change I to Change II shift issue", Lausanne, CDM-EPFL Working Paper, 2006 (forthcoming).

35. An effort in this area is the Executive Master in e-governance of EPFL, crafted exactly to undertake a continuous "learning journey" around the Governance "with and of" ICTs. (http://egov.epfl.ch/)

36. Olekambainei Emmanuel and Sintim-Misa Mavis Ampah, "Info-communication for Development in Africa", UN ICTs Task Force Series 2, ICTs for African Development, UN, NY 2003.

37. Molo Thioune Ramata, (Edited by) Information and Communication Technologies for Development in Africa: Opportunities and Challenges for Community Development, CODESRIA/IDRC, 2003.

38. NEPAD e-Africa Commission, www.nepad.org

39. The most recent and accurate overview of ongoing initiatives with regard to ICTs for development in Africa is included as an annexe to this book.

40. UNESCO's medium term strategy 2002-2007, 31 C/4: Chapter on "The contribution of ICTs to the development of education, science and culture and the construction of a knowledge society" - pp.53-56.

41. See Rossel Pierre, Cooperation at EPFL, 2002, Bridging digital divide

42. www.nua.com/surveys/how_many_online/index.html

43. United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Striving for Good Governance in Africa, 2004.

44. Sy, J. Habib, "Critical and Prospective Views on ICTs and Governance in Africa", in "Africa Networking: Development Information ICTs and Governance, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, UNECA, Addis Ababa, 2004

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4
ICTs FOR LOCAL GOVERNANCE IN AFRICA

4.1 LOCAL e-GOVERNMENT AND e-LOCAL GOVERNANCE: BENEFITS AND LIMITS

If we consider the "basic e-government equations: G2C, G2B and G2G", these are exponentially reproduced at local level. Local governments, in fact, are in the front line of government in their service delivery to the citizen (LG2C) and to business (LG2B), while at the same time, ICTs can improve co-ordination and communication within government agencies at different levels (LG2Gn) (where n = levels of government in a specific institutional setting). This is particularly true in the strengthening of financial systems and accountability, by reducing the risk of corruption through minimising the face-to-face relationships.

Local governments, in addition to being close to citizens and business, constitute for many of them the main (or even unique) representation of government. The relationship of citizens and local authorities tends to be one based on proximity as the interests at stake for both parties are clearly entwined concerning issues such as public services, urban development, school planning, environmental concerns and local politics. It is at the local level that the impact of ICTs on the relationship between governments and citizens, can be most effective.

Traditionally, the interaction between a citizen or business and a government agency took place in a government office. Utilising ICTs it is possible to locate service centres closer to the "clients" (e.g. citizens and businesses). Such centres may consist of an unattended kiosk in the government agency, a service kiosk located close to the client, or the use of a personal computer in the home or office. In this regard, it has to be underlined that the potential for ICTs to have a positive impact on the lives of citizens in a variety of ways (especially in marginalised and rural areas) is being widely recognised. In fact, cities and local authorities play key roles in the Information Society and are fully involved in the process of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS).

The Declaration of the World Summit of Cities and Local Authorities on the Information Society (Lyon, 5 December 2003), was the result of observations carried out throughout 2003 at the preparatory meetings of Bilbao, Shanghai, Curitiba and Nouakchott. It used as reference points other declarations and works carried out by many organisations in this field, such as the "Charter of citizens' rights in the Information Society", taking into account that "half of the world's population lives in cities and urban areas, whereas the other half relies increasingly on cities for their economic survival and very existence". Also being aware of the fact that, "by relying on the heritage and vitality of cities and regions, there is the increasing need to build a society of inclusive cities whose wealth is founded on their diversity, cultures and languages rather than a society of impersonal and uniform information", observing, among other conclusions and recommendations, that "cities and regions are often at the forefront regarding the transformations brought about by ICTs in areas as diverse as universal access, education and training, housing, culture sustainable economic development, water, sanitary conditions, social cohesion, etc.. it was therefore determined "to totally fulfil the role that befalls in developing the Information Society, being eager to provide new local and regional dynamism in its development, with the aim of improving the quality of life in local communities and answering the needs of citizens".1 For this purpose the United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), was also established in Paris, in May 2004, and the second phase of the World Summit of Cities and Local Authorities on the Information Society took place in Bilbao in November 2005.

But why should we focus on the local/municipal level when introducing ICTs in government operations?

At the local level (urban and rural municipalities), it is recognised that the appropriate use and integration of ICTs in the community can enhance and support social and economic development, particularly in empowering officials and community representatives; ensuring linkages, networking and community cohesion; providing timely, efficient, transparent and accountable services; improving the management of the services and operations; facilitating planning and policy making processes; monitoring and recording physical and social changes in the municipalities.

Moreover, the integration of ICTs into the local/municipal governance can lead to informed populations being the basis of effective participatory governance and a knowledgeable community. The challenge remains, however, on how the use of ICTs in the municipalities can be beneficiary to all the stakeholders while avoiding, at the same time, a digital divide between members of the municipality itself.

A particular and important aspect of the application of ICTs at the local level is related to the recognition of the governance system as an integrated combination of several actors other than the government and considering the potential in all the services that the government is to provide.

In fact, the developmental impact of ICTs at local level is twofold. The first consists of the benefits of enhancement of the infrastructure and applications to users of information and communication services who can be distinguished according to whether they use these services as an everyday tool for production, distribution or consumption, and for their day-to-day activities. The second consists of the benefits derived by the economy from changes in the production, supply and operation of communications infrastructure, facilities, equipment, services and applications, or more generally what we called: ICTs or info-communications (see before). 2

Improvements in ICTs lower the cost of information and knowledge exchange, the cost of dealing with others in the market (such as suppliers and customers), and the cost of business start-ups and of delivering social economic services, including governmental services. Through these processes, transaction costs in society drop which improves overall efficiency and growth. In many instances, the additional and more reliable information that becomes accessible will contribute to the expansion of markets, assisting, for example, producers to move from local/rural into regional and national markets, and from domestic to international markets. Access (or the lack of it) to cheap and sufficient information is an important determinant of the competitive advantage of firms, sectors and countries. Furthermore, the efficient and easy access by citizens to up-to-date information on their local and central governments, NGOs and other civil society institutions, and even corporate enterprises, improves interaction, mutual trust, confidence and participation. These, in turn, could enhance empowerment, unity, democracy, peace and stability.

But although there are many examples on the nature of the linkages between ICTs and local governments, there is no evidence that unequivocally proves that there is a direct causal connection between ICTs and innovations in local governance, ultimately, to support local economic development.

If we look at the experiences of integrating ICTs in local governance worldwide, there is a growing effort in providing connectivity and accessibility at a local level, but there is not yet enough on monitoring and evaluating the real impact of projects and programmes on effective social and economic development of local communities.

Most local governments in the USA have already met the recommendation by the Kettl Commission that all local governments serving populations of more than 25,000 have web sites by June 30th., 2002. Only 2 out of 71 local governments with this population did not have web sites in 2005. In this context there are also some interesting examples of "participatory e-governance at local level" or "e-participation", such as the City of St. Paul, in Minnesota, or Menlo Park, in California3, but some people argue that instead of increasing, "democracy is reducing in the United States, with people overloaded with false, misleading, corrupt or politically tainted information".4

The e-Europe Strategy5 focusses on "connectivity" at local level: schools, home-access, with national/local indicators and rewards for local governments and, within this framework at national level, there are many examples of particular interest in terms of e-participation, such as the National Strategy for local e-government of the British Government6, or the Italian National e-government strategy with Regional Plans7, and the new French national e-Administration strategy ADELE8 (just to mention a few). But the economy and especially the integration of ICTs in the day-to-day life of citizens and government is still lagging behind in many regions in Europe, especially in the south and marginalised areas.

The Canadian Government has been a pioneer in developing services "far-reaching" connecting communities and local governments with citizens, allowing their participation, even in control of the decision making process.9 But how much did the government spend to achieve these results? In Japan, the e-Japan Strategy emphasises the development of local e-governance schemes, including self-evaluation of online government services, allowing citizens' feedback and participation.10 However in the instance of Japan, as well as in the previous examples, we are talking about the richest regions of the world, and in particular some of the G8 countries.

In Australia, a "best practice" example is represented by the City of Brisbane11, the capital city of the State of Queensland. It is the third largest city in Australia with a growing economy. The Brisbane City Council's development of electronic government started in 1994 with the Customer Service Integration Project that introduced advanced technology and electronic business into Brisbane's Contact Centre environment. This Centre currently handles over 1.6 million calls per annum, providing information and action on more than 3000 separate Council services. The next major step was in 1996 when the Council released corporate information to Brisbane via the Internet at www.brisbane.qld.gov.au, at the same time as starting internal knowledge management through an extensive intranet known as CityWeb. A number of projects followed including public information kiosks, Internet applications and a telecommunications infrastructure review of the city. The Council then launched the first "Ourbrisbane.com Strategy" in late 2000. This has been an eight initiative programme which has included pro-active support for assisting communities and businesses online; the ourbrisbane.com Portal at www.ourbrisbane.com which connects the city's people with information and other people to encourage participation in the global information revolution and the city's life; affordable access strategies to address the "digital divide"; and further work on the telecommunications infrastructure. Successes to date include the doubling of community and business access to the Internet with 300 community organisations online covering sporting, environmental and seniors groups; more than 3000 businesses connected to each other via the eBIG user group and 7 online business networks; a successful city Portal; over 500 "Green PCs " (refurbished PCs at affordable prices) distributed; Internet training for nearly 50,000 people; free Internet offered through the extensive Library network and a city-wide telecommunications infrastructure plan. The next stage of the Strategy includes targets of: increasing weekly Internet usage by Brisbane people from 59% to 75% by December 2004; broadening the range of everyday uses for which Brisbane people use the Internet; and increasing the percentage of Brisbane business trading on the Internet. But is Brisbane the rule in Australia, or just an exception?

Some emerging countries have also pointed out the importance of strengthening local governance using ICTs. For example, in Mexico, the "Agenda Presidencial de Buen Gobierno", puts particular stress on Innovation & Quality of Local Governments12.

In Malaysia, the National ICTs Policy Planning and Strategic Intervention, is centred on the efficient provision of online services by the government at all levels, to improve the economic and social development of the country.13

The Indian case is recognised worldwide as an example, considering the several "good practices" on local e-governance development, often created with a "bottom-up" approach and the involvement of the civil society organisations, often led by young people. One of the most popular experiences is the e-Seva Centre in Andhra Pradesh.14 Following this example, many other initiatives have been started involving local communities in their own self-development.

In South-East Asia, the progress achieved by countries in the last few years bears witness to the effective potential of ICTs for development and how ICTs can lead the economy in a positive way in developing countries.

Looking at the municipal level, the "First Study on Digital Governance in Municipalities Worldwide"15 ranked Seoul, the City States of Hong Kong and Singapore, New York, and Shanghai as the Top Five Cities of 100 Large Cities Worldwide, even if New York City was ranked no.1 worldwide in terms of content. Rome, Auckland, Jerusalem, Tokyo and Toronto rank respectively in the 6th to 10th positions. Among the top 20 cities, three are from emerging countries: Tallinn (Estonia) 14th., Dubai (United Arab Emirates) 18th., and Jakarta (Indonesia) 20th. This survey was the first research effort to evaluate digital governance in municipalities throughout the world by examining the largest city in each of 98 countries with the highest percentage of Internet users, including Hong Kong and Macao. The research evaluated the official Web sites of each city in their native languages, by using 92 measures over five core areas (Security and Privacy, Usability, Content, Services, Citizen Participation), developing an index which was considered "culture neutral". The research identified a digital divide between developed and less developed countries. Although the average score for all cities is 28.10 out of 100, the average score in OECD countries is 36.34; while the average score in non-OECD countries is only 24.26. In addition, 67% of cities selected in Africa have not established official city websites, whereas only 3% in Europe have no city Web sites.

The results of this survey are highlighted from many examples of projects and experiences of innovative applications of ICTs at local level. Some of particular interest in developed countries are the project of e-Participation in the City of Tampere, Finland16; the Personalised Information and email notification system, in the United Kingdom17; the Iperbole Internet Civic Network, in Bologna, Italy18; the e-Democracy experience of the City of Issy-les-Moulineaux, France,19 and the M.O.R.E. – Member Organised Resource Exchange, in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.20 Some interesting examples of projects and experiences in developing countries are, for instance, the Citizen Service Centres, in Bahia, Brazil21, the Seoul Anti Corruption - OPEN System, in South Korea22 and the TOM Portal for e-Democracy in Estonia23.

But are we sure that all these experiences are successful and are really increasing the participation of citizens, and especially the poor and marginalised people ?

A recent report of UNCRD, Japan, evaluates the cases of Singapore and Naga City (Philippines) underlining that, "while these cities are making major contributions to their country's economy and house populations who are participating in the information revolution, large sections of their populations (50% or more), live in poverty, are located in slums, and engaged in informal sector activities, being therefore seriously threatened by human development"24. What about their needs and voices?

This situation can lead to an increased "domestic digital divide" (DDD Factor). In fact, according to Bridges.org Report (2004), "there is an overall trend of growing disparities in access to and use of ICTs between countries (the international digital divide), and between groups within countries (the domestic digital divide)"25. In addition to this, the constraints are aggravated in most countries by other factors, such as: class and age (intergenerational digital divide), ethnics and gender inequalities and discriminations, and race (digital apartheid).26 Of particular importance at local level is moreover what can be defined the "language divide". In fact, most of the applications and the content of ICTs (especially the Internet) is in English. Thus, millions of people are not in a position to benefit from ICTs because of the language barrier.

An important aspect to be considered is that, in introducing ICTs in governmental operations, there is the risk that large amounts of funds are being spent on creating infrastructure to enable people to have access to ICTs in developing countries. However, if we fail to recognise that access is necessary, but not the only condition for creating impact, and ignores capacity-building, citizens' participation and content development, then much of this funding will be wasted (Cost Factor).

In this connection, many of the ICTs applications that are deemed to be successful on anecdotal evidence, are, in practice, only partially successful: early recognition blinds the project managers to possible shortcomings, which remain unattended to and which can lead to failure. In particular, it is apparent that solutions that work in developed countries cannot simply be transplanted to developing country environments: solutions must be based on an understanding of local needs and conditions. (Contextualisation Factor).

Furthermore the, let us say, "natural" limits that are connected to local governance systems, such as the lack of capacity both in terms of human and financial resources, the difficulties related to the geographical position of local communities (distance from cities and lack of access to infra and info structure) have to be considered. Last, but not least, the need to communicate in local languages, respecting and in keeping with the local cultural heritage and traditional systems of governance; this includes the important role to be played by women and young people, and their connection with the hierarchical and chieftaincy organisation of local societies. This is the Cultural Factor, that is of course directly linked to the degree of "readiness" of the community for the introduction of ICTs and innovation in general. (Readiness Factor).

Therefore, if we consider the factors of risk (or success) identified above, enumerating them in a logical order, such as: Readiness; Contextualisation; Cultural/Language; Cost and Domestic Digital Divide factors, we will have a complex equation that will never have the same solution.

Introducing ICTs in local governance is not at all a simple issue; it has to deal not only with the "physical" access problem, but with the lost opportunity of people who are unable to effectively use ICTs either because they do not know how to use them or do not understand how ICTs can be relevant to their lives. It is fundamental to look at the social issues like basic literacy, poverty and healthcare and how ICTs can become part of the solution to these critical problems.

Given this fact, the key to success in introducing ICTs in local governance, are political will, community leadership and ownership. In addition, accurate strategic planning, effective monitoring and critical evaluation are indispensable in the identification of factors that inhibit impact and ensure sustainability. The development of such a policy framework cannot be done without considering the "local" component and community development and how these integrate and use ICTs, in order to create the concept of "e-Local Governance", that can be defined as:

4.2. SOME EXPERIENCES OF USING ICTs AT LOCAL GOVERNMENT LEVEL IN AFRICA

In Africa, many countries are developing National ICTs Strategies that, in some cases, are already producing positive results and are leading (or can lead) to success. Some examples are: Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa and Tunisia. Many other countries are embarking on National ICTs Strategies and Programmes, often "mixed" with Administrative Reforms, Good Governance Strategies, or Decentralisation Programmes.

At the same time, there are many examples of interesting projects, often supported by international donors and agencies, that are focussing on innovative applications of ICTs in local governance in countries lacking of ICTs infrastructure, through the use of hand held devices, touch screens and keyboard access in local languages. Some of these projects were presented to the "Workshop on Innovative Applications of ICTs for Local Governance in Africa", jointly organised by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in Addis Ababa, between 7th. and 9th. June, 2004.27 Among the several presentations of case studies, programmes and projects, of particular interest was the Project of "Application of Hand-held Computers in the Delivery of Health Services in Uganda", managed by the Uganda Health Information Network (UHIN) and funded by IDRC. This project aims at determining cost-effective ways of enhancing access, sharing and communication of critical health and medical information in a timely and efficient manner for the benefit of health care providers, managers and planners, in the Ugandan technological and institutional context. Successful examples of the application of ICTs at local level are represented by the case of the Mangaung Local Municipality, in South Africa, with the project of "Knowledge Management in the Electronic Delivery of Municipal Services", and the Project of ICTs Application in Local Government in Senegal managed by the NGO "Observatoire de la Gouvernance" (SAFEFOD) and funded by IDRC, on the development of an ICTs based accounting system of control, to prevent corruption.

Other projects of particular relevance for their cultural aspects include the Project of "Capacity Building Support for Local Governments" in Zimbabwe; and the "ICTs and Traditional Governance Project" in Ghana.

Some interesting efforts of strongly introducing ICTs in the governmental strategies, were presented in the "Woreda Study: ICTs Needs in Decentralisation Process" in Ethiopia, as well as the Project on "E-government Applications for Local and Central Governments in Ethiopia", which developed an interface in Amharic through a Multi-lingual Content Management System; the "Utilization of ICTs in the Promotion of Decentralized Governance" in Uganda and the e-government Strategy in the Gambia.

As highlighted in the annexe to this study, many other initiatives, programmes and projects in Africa focus on the application of ICTs for local governance. What is important is that these initiatives are always integrated in the government strategies of decentralisation and to effectively improve the governance systems for better delivery services to citizens and business, and to also increase their participation. But notwithstanding the growing importance of ICTs and local governance, there is a clear recognition of the need to move away from anecdotal analysis of strengthening local governance towards a more rigorous, evidence and outcome-based analysis of developing trends and the implementation of ICTs in local governance in Africa.

Notes

1. Declaration of the World Summit of Cities and Local Authorities on the Information Society (Lyon, 5th. December, 2003).

2. See also, Olekambainei Emmanuel and Sintim-Misa Mavis Ampah, "Info-communication for Development in Africa", UN ICTs Task Force Series 2, ICTs for African Development, UN, NY 2003.

3. www.firstgov.gov

4. Sy, J. Habib, "Critical and Prospective Views on ICTs and Governance in Africa", in "Africa Networking: Development Information ICTs and Governance, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, UNECA, Addis Ababa, 2004

5. www.europa.eu.int

6. www.localegov.gov.uk

7. www.italia.gov.it

8. www.adele.fr

9. http://www.gc.ca

10. www.kantei.go.jp

11. www.ourbrisbane.com

12. www.presidencia.gob.mx

13. www.gov.my/MyGov

14. www.andhrapradesh.com

15. This survey was conducted jointly by the E-governance Institute of Rutgers University-Newark and the Global e-Policy e-government Institute of Sungkyunkwan University, Korea, and was co-sponsored by the UN Division for Public Administration and Development Management (UNDESA/DPADM)), and the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA). The results of the survey are available on www.unpan. org

16. www.etampere.fi/infocity

17. www.info4local.gov.uk

18. www.comune.bologna.it

19. www.issy.com

20. www.stlouis.missouri.org

21. www.ba.gov.br

22. www.open.metro.seoul.kr

23. tom.riik.ee

24. Regional Development Dialogue, Vol. 23, N° 2, United Nations Centre for Regional Development, UNCRD, Nagoya, Japan, 2002.

25. Bridges.org, "Spanning the Digital Divide: Understanding and tackling the Issues", www.bridges.org

26. USA, Department of Commerce, 2000.

27. www.idrc.org

PART II:
CASE STUDIES ON ICTS FOR LOCAL GOVERNANCE

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5
THE ROLE OF ICTs IN THE DECENTRALISATION POLICY IN SENEGAL

5.1. CONTEXT AND POLICY

5.1.1. The decentralisation policy in Senegal

Since its independence in 1960, the Republic of Senegal has committed to a comprehensive process of reform of the State. Crucial to this reform is the policy of "progressive" decentralisation that seeks to empower local government and support local development.

This process had been started by the establishment of the "Rural Communities" in 1972, (Law 72-02), and completed in the '90s by the several laws and legal acts that led to the Law 96-06, "Code of Local Government"1, and related laws and legal acts. In addition to the Rural Communities, the local governments in Senegal are the "Regions" and the "Communes" (or Municipalities).

The policy of decentralisation is designed in a way that should ensure participation by people and their representatives in the management of public affairs, and this participation should be enhanced as these levels of government become progressively more independent vis-à-vis the central power. Moreover, to implement the decentralisation, in 1998, an Agency for Regional Development (ARD – Agence Régionale de Développement) was established. Its aim is to stimulate regional and local development by supporting the elaboration and implementation of regional and local development plans2.

At present, there are 441 local governments in Senegal; they are composed of 11 Regions; 110 Communes and 320 Rural Communities. They are supposed to be governed according to the basic principles underpinning the process of decentralisation, which are: free administration, devolution of power and solidarity. It means that, in addition to administrative decentralisation, there is also a strong process of "deconcentration" of functions from central to local level, and a consequent need of resources, both financial and human, to effectively manage the twofold effect of decentralisation policy.

But yet there are many obstacles to the effective transfer of these powers. Most local elected officials have no access to legal texts and they have neither the means nor the capacity to play their roles fully.

These constraints prevent them from clearly understanding the legislation on decentralisation and empowerment of local government and thus acting effectively and according to the capacity of the local government. This situation is of particular concern because the working instruments (codes, regulations, laws, decrees) are in French, the country's official language, while most local officials are illiterate or able to operate only in the dialect of their region, albeit that the new Constitution indicates that all elected representatives should be able to read and write in the national language (i.e. French).

If we consider then the situation of basic equipment and the capacities of managing ICTs, this is even more limited, and in some cases local governments have not even access to basic infrastructures such as electricity or telephony.

5.1.2. The National ICTs Policy and the Senegal ACACIA Strategy (SAS)

The African Communities and the Information Society programme, better known simply as ACACIA, is an IDRC initiative aimed at "promoting the use of ICTs in African communities, in order to prevent them from being increasingly marginalised from the information society, and also to help them achieve their development objectives".

The ACACIA programme seeks to establish a reliable knowledge base by identifying the most appropriate policies, techniques, applications and contents, approaches and methodologies for promoting the appropriation of ICTs by disadvantaged communities, and in particular by young people and women, by providing ready access to these tools and putting them to effective use.

In Senegal, ACACIA has been underway since 1997, in a context that has seen growing empowerment of development players as the state has withdrawn from productive activities.

In this regard, nevertheless, the Senegalese authorities were quick to recognise the importance of ICTs for economic and social development, as confirmed by the Prospective Study: Senegal 2015, which foresaw the emergence of the communication society based on the development of ICTs and which proposed as a strategic objective "strengthening and facilitating access to information and promoting social communication", there was not a coherent framework for introducing ICTs, despite the existence of some of Africa's most highly developed telecommunications infrastructure. In fact, despite the beginnings of what we might call a national policy for ICTs were apparent as early as 1985, with establishment of the National Telecommunications Company (SONATEL), reflecting the determination of the Government of Senegal to give priority to development of the telecommunications sector; and despite the many players involved in the field of ICTs, it was only in 1996 that the government issued its first statement on telecommunications development policy (1996-2000).

Moreover, considering that local governments were taking increasing responsibility, and several policy areas have been transferred to them: education, health, governance, etc., it was pivotal to take into proper consideration the need expressed by local communities in developing strategies and implementing national programmes.

It must also be noted that, despite the interest in ICTs on the part of government and even of the private sector, there was a glaring lack of expertise in this field, particularly when it came to research, while, at the same time, civil society organisations were becoming increasingly active in economic and social life at the local, national and international levels, and through their actions, discrete but often highly visible, there was the clear opportunity to influence the state in its definition of national strategic priorities.

In this context, the process of preparing the Senegal ACACIA Strategy (SAS) was highly participatory, thanks to which the programme has indeed taken account of the needs expressed by the people, but within an overall framework of development priorities identified by the authorities, consistent with the sectoral approach of the country's development strategy. These priorities relate essentially to education, employment and entrepreneurship, natural resource management, governance and health. The Acacia programme therefore reflects the sectoral approach to development in Senegal, through its focus on these key sectors, with due regard of course, to the needs and priorities expressed by the people themselves.

5.1.3. The current framework: the National Programme for Good Governance

Following the previous experiences and considering the different sectoral policies underway, the new Government "Gouvernement de l'Alternance" elected in March 2000, committed itself to strengthen the "good governance" of the country, engaging in a global reform of the state and a modernisation of the public sector.

This commitment, with the support of the development partners, has been institutionalised and designed within the framework of the "National programme for good governance"3, which is a comprehensive programme coming from the previous "Integrated Programme of Public Sector Reform" (PIRSP), more coherent with the "Strategic Document for Poverty Reduction" (DSRP) and in line with the vision of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and the orientations identified in the "Economic and Social Development Plan: 2002-2007" (PDES).

Among the strategic lines of the "National programme for good governance", decentralisation is indicated as a central issue for state reform. In fact, it is not only seen with regard to the organisation and execution of local government affairs, but, more generally, with concern about the "functional relations" of power (devolution/transfer of competencies) and the consequent capacity of the state to adapt to evolving society, and the needs of responsibility, proximity and participation of people in the management of public affairs.

The national programme, based on the weaknesses that have been identified in its analysis, indicate three lines of action with regard to local governance: 1) Improving the institutional and organisational framework and the capacity of human resources; 2) Strengthening the co-ordination of activities among different levels of government and development partners; 3) Improving the public finance system at a local level and decentralising the management of public expenditure.

With regard to the role of ICTs, whilst underlining the insufficient and incoherent state of deployment of ICTs in the public administration, it stresses the potential role in supporting the modernisation of the state and the promotion of good governance with a particular focus on providing "quality" information to citizens.

5.1.4. e-Senegal: a Strategic Vision and Action Plan

In January 2002, in an official report, the President of the Republic, H. E. Abdoulaye Wade, expressed the vision of the national e-government, based upon the conviction that ICTs are a great lever for economic development in Africa.

The vision of President Wade for Senegal, is to pass "from Senegal to e-Senegal, that includes the passage from Government to e-government, and from Citizen to e-Citizen".

To manage this transition, in July 2004, the President established the "State Informatics Agency" (ADIE)4. This new structure, that followed on from the activity of the previous Direction for State Computerisation ("Direction Informatique de l'Etat"), was created in order to better co-ordinate, monitor and support the implementation of the ambitious programme of computerisation of public administration, and make the national e-government strategy a reality.

In addition to marketing purposes, also being the "champion" of NEPAD's ICTs component, the objectives of e-Senegal were identified and the strategic plan initiated already in 2000, in partnership with the World Bank. In fact, since 2000, the "Programme of modernisation of the Administrative Information Systems" (PMSIA) was launched and implemented according to six action lines: 1) Information Systems Coordination, including an ICTs Needs assessment and provision of ICTs necessary equipment; 2) Government ICTs Infrastructure: development of the Government Intranet, including the creation of a "Resource Centre" and an advanced network linking key institutions and Ministries, as well as some applications for communication and management of human resources and material; 3) Computerisation and development of key applications of the Ministry of Economics and Finance; this included the provision of equipment and the development of specific applications and support of already existing systems; 4) Computerisation of a main public service: the Postal Service; 5) Computerisation of a main Academic Centre: the University "Gaston Berger"; 6) Modernisation of the structure of the Ministry of the Interior.

This last action line was directly connected to the process of decentralisation and strengthening of local governance systems. The Ministry of the Interior was already providing basic equipment to the "Prefecture" (local delegations) and supported the establishment of Regional Units of Informatics for Development (Unités Régionales d'Informatiques pour le Développement – URID).

More generally, as underlined during the inauguration of the "Intranet of the Government", held in Dakar, 15th. March 2005, in the presence of H.E. the President of the Republic5, the objective of the Government was to expand the communication system to link all the different levels of government with a particular focus on remote and disadvantaged areas.

It was clear to the government, in fact, that the success of the e-Senegal strategy would be based upon the effective and efficient utilisation of ICTs to support local governance systems.

5.1.5. The way forward

In this context the Government now considered the revision of the National Programme for Good Governance, in order to strengthen the component related to local governance and its relation with ICTs. A national workshop on "ICTs for local governance" to provide input to the "Roundtable of development partner" was held in June 2005 to revise the PNBG6.

This is also connected to the renewed role and mission that the government was giving to the competent authorities at central level, which are the Ministry of Decentralisation and Local Government and the Ministry of Regional Planning and Decentralised Co-operation.

It is clear to all the actors of development in Senegal that despite the availability of financial and technical resources and the strong leadership and commitment by the Government, there was a lack of co-ordination and a weak strategic plan with regard to the issue of local governance, and in particular how to make best use of ICTs for local development.

5.2. SAFEFOD'S PROJECT ON "THE ROLE OF ICTS IN DECENTRALISATION POLICY"

5.2.1. Background and Justification

The strategic justification of the Senegal ACACIA Strategy (SAS), preparation of which started in October 1996 and which was completed in March 1997, was the decision to make ICTs available to communities, in particular poor communities, and to see how these ICTs could contribute to their development.

The SAS sought to foster co-ordinated activity in policymaking, infrastructure, technologies, and applications and contents in order to promote a true national strategy for using ICTs for development. The objective was to encourage establishment of an independent framework for concerted action in the field of ICTs, a framework that would provide the political authorities with a solid basis for their ICTs policy. This was based essentially on a series of experimental demonstration projects. These pilot projects were undertaken in order to verify the hypotheses underlying the Acacia programme, as well as to derive lessons that could be applied on a broader scale, and that would be of use to policy-makers.

For this purpose, the preparation of the programme was made with the participation of various institutions, national and local, representing government and civil society, researchers, and development players. This consultation process included, in addition to a Permanent Secretariat and some horizontal and co-ordinating committees, five sectoral working groups (health, education and training, employment and income generation, natural resource management and governance).

These were standing fora for consideration and discussion among agencies and individuals: each group was supposed to oversee the research priorities in its respective field.

An important point to be considered is the profile of the members of the various SAS structures. These members come from different key sectors of the country (universities, private sector, NGOs, civil society) and are involved in research, the economy, health, governance etc. These are supposed to be people who have the capacity to exert direct or indirect influence on policies, or who are aware of the usefulness of ICTs for development.

Therefore, considering the increasing importance of the role of local governments, and the great potential of ICTs in improving the performances of any modern administration, the Working Group on Governance which was co-ordinated by Prof. Yero Sylla, identified the role of ICTs in decentralisation policy as one of the priority areas to be explored.

In fact, despite the, at that time, recent advent of the Internet and of high-capacity processing and storage technologies, it was clear to the working group that ICTs could enormously support the needs of management of local governments, as well as the potential for increasing the participation of citizens in decision making with regard to public affairs at local level. At the same time, this could support local economic development. But the situation of local governments, and in particular the awareness and capacities of elected representatives was negligible and, in the majority of local governments, there was a lack of basic infrastructure and conditions (such as electricity for instance) for the introduction of ICTs at local level. Specific tools to support management of local government were also non-existent.

In the face of this situation, the SAS Working Group on Governance proposed to launch a research project, to raise awareness about the potential of ICTs for local governance, and to develop and test some pilot applications to sustain the daily management of local authorities.

It was proposed that the project be co-ordinated by SAFEFOD (African Society of Education and Training for Development) with financial support from IDRC/ACACIA.

5.2.2. Strategy and Objectives

The global objective of the project was to inform and sensitise local officials, elected representatives and the government about the role and impact of ICTs on decentralisation policy, and, at the same time, create the enabling environment for the implementation of an "Observatory of Decentralisation and Local Governance".

To attain this goal, the specific objectives of the project were to:

a) Build a partnership between the government, the local elected representatives and the civil society;

b) Assess the "state of the art" of ICTs integration in local government operations;

c) Establish a "research-laboratory" to develop and test ICTs applications to support local government operations;

d) Disseminate the results of research and laboratory tests through a National Campaign of awareness and communication on the role of ICTs for local governance;

e) Study the feasibility of the "Observatory of Decentralisation and Local Governance".

The project was expected to increase the awareness of the "actors of decentralisation" on the possibilities and potential of ICTs to support local governance and sustain the decentralisation process, as well as establishing a permanent mechanism for consultation among all the stakeholders involved in this policy.

To achieve this result, the methodology to be followed implied a strong participatory approach, in order to effectively involve all the necessary experts and representatives of governmental and non-governmental authorities and bodies concerned.

Moreover, in order to provide a strong demonstrator effect, it was decided to give high visibility to the output of the research by organising practical demonstrations for the benefit of all interested stakeholders, both at local and central level.

5.2.3. Rationale and Structure

Before the implementation of the project, during the activities of the SAS working group on governance, a preliminary analysis of the main problems related to the introduction of ICTs at local government level, was carried out.

This preliminary activity, mainly based on the experience of the members of the Working Group, was further reinforced during the first phase of activity of the project.

The main elements identified as weaknesses for local governments, can be summarised by the following:

• Many local governments have no access to basic infrastructures, including electricity and telephones, so that the potential of using ICTs cannot possibly even be considered;

• Even where possible, there is a very limited use of basic ICTs in the management of local governments. This is due to several reasons, including financial limitations, limited management skills and in particular a weak capacity in the management of ICTs.

• In addition to these factors, there are other important issues that emerged in analysing the situation, such as the fact that there was a very limited awareness of the capacities of ICTs, and consequently a potential reluctance to innovate, as well as more concrete constraints due to the comparison of this issue with the other priorities of the different communities.

• Moreover, following the introduction of the new law of decentralisation that foresaw a different administrative organisation and devolution of important functions and power to the local governments, there were no effective changes to support its operational implementation. In particular, notwithstanding the complexity of the management of the local government, and especially considering the new functions to be executed, all activities were performed in a traditional way, with very little use (if any) of ICTs.

Based upon the above mentioned preliminary analysis and the strategic options identified, the project was structured around a period of one year, with a number of activities to be conducted in parallel. These activities included the following timetable (the number representing the month):

1. Launch of the project and establishment of the institutional partnership;

2. Launch of the study on ICTs and decentralisation;

3. Establishment of the laboratory;

4. Conclusion of the study on ICTs and decentralisation;

5. Analysis and exploitation of the results and data acquired with the study;

6. Preliminary test of basic products in the laboratory;

7. Test and demonstration of basic products with other experts and partners;

8. Inclusion of feed-back of the demonstration and comments by other experts and partners;

9. Preliminary presentation of results and products among key gstakeholders;

10. Dissemination of results and public demonstrations of products;

11. Study of feasibility of the Observatory of local governance and decentralisation;

12. Final Report and Evaluation.

The structure of the project shows that the process that the research had been designed to undertake could not be fulfilled without the active participation by the representatives of all the stakeholders, directly or indirectly, involved in decentralisation.

For this reason, particular importance was given to the involvement of experts coming from different institutions in the analysis of priorities and the development of the products, as well as to the dissemination of results and the public demonstration that was supposed to coincide, during the ninth month of the project, with the electoral campaign for the regional and local elections.

The principal players involved during the project were:

• Associations of local elected representatives: Association of Rural Community Presidents, Association of Mayors of Senegal, Association of Regional Council Presidents;

• Central Administration: Ministry of Local Governments; Directorate for State Registry Management; Ministry of Research and Technological Development; Ministry of ICTs; Prime Minister's Office; Presidency of the Republic;

• Local Administrations: some local governments and municipalities, and the Association of Municipality Development (ADM);

• University and other Civil Society Organisations;

• Resource Persons and Experts recognised at national level, including the IDRC/SAS Working Group on Governance.

Active involvement of these players was expected to result in the appropriation of the approach and the outputs of the project, with a view to improving implementation of the decentralisation policy.

5.2.4. Organisation and Management Arrangements

Given the specific objectives attained by the project, and considering its conception within the framework of the SAS working group on governance, it was decided that the project would be executed by SAFEFOD (African Society of Education and Training for Development).

SAFEFOD, in fact, is a Senegalese non-governmental organisation with an tradition of experience in local development and governance. It was created in 1991 with the aim of promoting a democratic and developed society in Senegal, but also with a pan-African horizon.

It is apolitical and non-profit making and, during the years of activity it developed and tested an integrated and participative model for Local Governance centred on education and training, communication and development support.

The target of the activities of SAFEFOD has always been the grassroots communities, including the local elected representatives. But to make good governance emerge, there is the need that governments, both at local and at central level, and civil society, play their roles fully, and in partnership with each other.

The model of local governance instituted by SAFEFOD is based upon the assistance of the three partners of local development (state, local governments and grassroots communities/civil society) to face the major challenges constituting impediments to good governance: poverty, illiteracy and lack of communication.

To achieve this, the SAFEFOD model of local governance, tested in the field since the early 90,s, consists of three main strategies:

• Training and Capacity Building;

• Dynamic Interactions and communication;

• Development Support.

As indicated by Prof. Yero Sylla, Executive Secretary of SAFEFOD, "the originality of this model derives from the fact that it views the "dynamization" of people and institutions through the deliberative organs of the local governments. Indeed, these entities are rarely taken into account, least of all involved, by the various intervening parties of the civil society. Yet they constitute the link between the state and the citizens, since they are the most decentralized politico-administrative centre from which it is possible to stimulate a purposeful and a behaviour likely to give thrust to lasting development at the grassroots".7

Early in the development of the "local governance model", it appeared clear that ICTs could play an important role in reaching the objectives assigned to local governments, as well as sustaining their achievements, and so SAFEFOD decided to integrate ICTs in the centre of the model itself. Thus, the project on "The role of ICTs in decentralisation policy", gave SAFEFOD the opportunity to achieve this option, as early as in 1997 in Africa.

Since the project was a research activity, and also considering the preliminary, and perhaps even too advanced subject of research identified, it was decided to invest a relatively small amount of financial resources, that is, a total budget of 101,276 Canadian Dollars ($CAD). The resources were distributed as indicated in the following table.

SAFEFOD's Project The Role of ICTs in decentralisation policy – Budget:

Source: IDRC, Dossier n.97-8153-01.

The project was therefore conducted with a reasonable investment in computer hardware and the participation of local human resources. In particular, in addition to its Project Manager, Prof. Yero Sylla, Executive Secretary of SAFEFOD, two principal and experienced consultants were hired to conduct the studies on ICTs and decentralisation, and to present their findings to a national workshop to launch the project. Moreover, other technical consultants were hired to develop the specific products and organise the research and tests in the laboratory. At the same time, to support the research activities and also as a way to improve the research capacity in this area, it was decided to hire some young researchers as trainees, from the University.

In addition to the principal consultants specifically hired for the project, other resources were dedicated to the project among SAFE-FOD's staff. This was in particular with the objective to develop a sustainable laboratory of research usable after the end of the IDRC's funded project, and to utilise the "network" of contacts and presence that SAFEFOD already had in the field, to test the products output of the research and to disseminate the results and findings of the project.

Thus, the project, notwithstanding that much of the research was developed in the laboratory, also involved a continuous contact with representatives of the central and local administrations and institutions identified, as well as many tests and demonstrations in the field.

With regard to the timing of the project's activities, it should be noted that, as the phase of preparation, started in July 1997, lasted longer than expected, the project itself started officially only in December 1997, therefore becoming effectively operational in January 1998.

In the same way, since the release of the outputs of the research were not immediately successful, the dissemination of results and demonstration of the products, as well as its update and improvement, continued also after the end of the project (the final workshop was held in March 1999, with three months of delay) as a self-sustained activity by SAFEFOD. In this regard, it should also be underlined that the human resources dedicated to the project, and especially to its follow-up, have been changed from a more researchers profile to the team that is now taking care of the results of the research and is much more market-oriented (see the next section).

Finally, with regard to monitoring and evaluation of the Project, IDRC established a Committee for monitoring the progress of the project, also aiming at supporting the executing agency in its activities. In many cases, IDRC supported the activity of disseminating the results of the project, by inviting SAFEFOD to demonstrate the products in workshops, organised by IDRC, which were not part of the project's budget8.

Figure 1. SAFEFOD's stand at an International Fair in Dakar, 1999

5.2.5. Activities and Results

a) The Study on ICTs and decentralisation and the "Partnership-Workshop"

The activities of the project followed the structure proposed in the project document and attained all the achievements and expected output of the research.

In the first phase of the project, a more detailed and in-depth research of the "state of the art" and the situation of ICTs and decentralisation in the field was undertaken, in the period January-February 1998, by the two principal consultants. The two consultants focussed their analysis on not only the general theory of decentralisation and ICTs, but also on the practice and concrete application at the local level, also providing some comparisons and examples from other cases at the international level.

Next, the study, in two different reports, was presented to the "Partnership-Workshop on the role of ICTs in the implementation of decentralisation policy in Senegal", organised by SAFEFOD and IDRC on the 25th. February, 1998 at the Savana Hotel in Dakar.

The workshop was attended by all the stakeholders (actors in the decentralisation), including representatives of the Central and Local governments, of the local elected representatives; media and civil society organisations. To mark the importance of the event, the workshop was opened by the Minister of Decentralisation who observed that the workshop was "a fundamental step for the implementation of an observatory of decentralisation and local governance".

After presenting the objectives of the project and launching it officially, the findings of the two studies on Decentralisation and ICTs were presented. In particular, they underlined the three-fold relationship between participation, local management/administration and responsibility and the functional relationship that exists between decentralisation-policy and ICTs in the governance arena.

Having this relationship in mind, the objectives of the workshop were to highlight the relations of causality, interdependence and complementarity existing between the problems faced by the policy of decentralisation and the management of local governments, and the solutions that ICTs can provide to them. For this reason, the working activities of the workshop were divided into three working groups, each of them focussing on the specific aspects faced by the different categories of Local Government: Regions, Municipalities/Communes; Rural Communities.

The conclusions of the workshop helped the project management team to better identify the matrix of problems, infrastructures and roles of actors in the management of local government; to elaborate the Questionnaire for the survey; orientate the laboratory tests; and enable the implementation of the Observatory for local governance and decentralisation.

In this connection, once the laboratory was established and exploited the findings and data acquired with the studies, the following phase of the project focussed on the research in the laboratory and the preliminary test of basic products was developed. In this regard, given the results of the studies and the conclusions of the workshop, the research identified priorities and conducted the following experiments and activities:

1. Design of a Web Site;

2. Development of two software applications for

a. management of the budget and

b. the management of the registry system;

3. Conception of an interactive multi-language vocal server.

Figure 2. Partnership-Workshop

From left to right: MM. Cheikh Sadibou Fall, Association of Mayors of Senegal (AMS), Moussé Daby Diagne, Association of Regional Council Presidents (APR), Pr Yèro Sylla, Executive Secretary of SAFEFOD, Macky Sall, Minister in charge of Ministry of Local Government and Decentralisation, Djilali Benmouffok, Representative of IDRC and Aly Lô, President of the Association of Rural Community Presidents.

b) The output of the laboratory research:

1. The Web Site - Observatory on Local Governance:

The designed website is bilingual (French and English) and provides information about decentralisation laws and legal and administrative acts; as well as information on local governments and their councils, and a press review on decentralisation policy.

The Web site also contains several publications, including the summary of each issue of the "Journal of Local Governance", edited in French by SAFEFOD9.

Of course, if we look at the web site today, it may appear to be not a great innovation, but if we consider that the idea of using Internet technology was conceived in a project for local governance in Africa in 1996, and the web site designed and developed in 1997/98, when the Internet was still a new technology not yet widely diffused even in industrialised countries, then the innovative role of this activity is quite obvious.

The web site has been operational since 1998 and it has been continuously updated and managed by local resources at SAFEFOD. Its address is: www.safefod.org

2. Management software applications for local governments:

The software applications designed and developed during the research project were focussing on two basic operations executed by local government, and which were not yet computerised: the management of the budget; and the management of the civil registry.

Therefore, the technological solutions adopted as software at the beginning were based on simple existing, proprietary systems, such as Microsoft Excel and, in a second version, Microsoft Access. The preliminary versions also had a low level of security and resulted in some problems of management and sustainability. After several revisions, tests, demonstrations, and advanced releases, and especially after the update undertaken in partnership with a private company, in 2004 the software was revised completely in order to have improved performance and taking into account users' requirements with regard to security and "user-friendliness". From a technical perspective, the systems are designed with up-to-date IT tools, involving relational database manager programmes (Microsoft SQL, Access or Oracle), and the applications can be installed on Stand Alone Systems or Local Area Networks (LAN).

The functionalities of the software, in their current version, are the following:

a. CAURI: Budget Management Software;

The software allows the management of the entire administrative accounting system for local governments, providing the possibility of supporting the preparation and execution of the budget in accordance with the prevailing regulations and, at the same time, to produce the Administrative Account Statement as required by the authorities. In this regard, it also allows recording, but without the possibility of modifying, the approved budgets of the previous years. It is therefore a statistical analysis tool which provides performance indicators indispensable for decision-making.

b. CIVIS: Civil Registry Management Software:

The software includes all the functionalities required for the management of a registration centre, providing the necessary functionality for the management of the registries of births, deaths and marriages, including marginal notes and explanations. It also provides for the possibility of editing all registration forms, in different versions, as required by the regulations and to produce statistics and reports. Integrating a large number of parameters to be adapted to all the cases evoked by the regulations regarding the registration systems, the application is flexible and secure, since it includes an advanced system to manage users' accounts allowing different and specific functionalities based on groups of users.

3. Vocal server:

The Vocal server was designed and programmed to be multilingual, with the possibility of using French, English and six local languages spoken in Senegal: Fula, Wolof, Joola, Sereer, Mandinka and Soninke).

The vocal server was designed to provide information about decentralisation, local governments, civil society organisations and donor agencies, available anytime and from anywhere in Senegal and throughout the world, by only a telephone call at the server number. The server provides a voice mail message system to allow communication between the different "actors of decentralisation" (state, local governments, civil society organisations, donors, etc.). The vocal server was tested successfully at the end of the project, and it is still available, but its implementation was not continued after the project due to the high cost of implementing its content and the limited response by the potential users.

c) Demonstration activities and Dissemination of results:

Once the products output of the research in the laboratory were developed, the project started the phase of demonstration to disseminate the results of the research, verify the usefulness of the products and, with particular regard to the management software, to test their applicability to local governments. For this purpose, in addition to a number of communication activities which also included many press-releases about the project and its results, a Final National workshop to present the results of the research was organised by SAFEFOD and IDRC, on 9th. March, 1999.

Figure 3. Final National Workshop

The workshop was attended by many practitioners and representatives of all the different stakeholders involved in the process of decentralisation.

Many other public demonstrations were also organised in the following months, including presentations to the President of the Republic Abdou Diouf, many Ministers, and other high level personalities and representatives of authorities at local, central and international level.

Among the different activities, the output of the project was also presented as a case of success of the ACACIA Programme, to the former Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chrétien, accompanied by the former Prime Minister of Senegal, Mr. Mamadou Lamine Loum, during a visit to Senegal on 9th. November, 1999, to participate in an event organised by IDRC/ACACIA.

Finally, as a result of the research project, what cannot be forgotten is the high awareness raised about the potential of ICTs for local governance, as well as the needs and challenges to face in successfully implementing the decentralisation policy. As a consequence of this, the main objective of the project, to establish an Observatory of local governance and decentralisation, in addition to being a result of the research, was necessarily also identified as a required mechanism to

Figure 4. Demonstration to the President of the Republic Abdou Diouf

The former President of the Republic of Senegal M. Abdou Diouf visit the stand of SAFEFOD for a demonstration during the exposiion organised beside the General Assembly of the Association of Mayors of Senegal (AMS), 22nd and 23rd July 1999, Hôtel Méridien Président (Dakar)

be further developed and monitored continuously by all the different stakeholders, but in particular by the civil society.

5.3. CONCLUSIONS

5.3.1. Impact on decentralisation policy

As indicated by the project manager, Prof. Yero Sylla, "the research project was designed in a way to provide the local authorities with instruments for managing local government. But it was up to these authorities to decide how to use these instruments". An example might be a government decision to adopt the tools (budget and civil registry software) developed by the project for local government management. The project manager believes that with this strategy, the decentralisation policy would have become more effective over time, because those responsible for implementing it would be better equipped.

Figure 5. Demonstration to the Prime Minister of Canada M. Jean Chrétien, and Prime Minister of Senegal, Mr. Mamadou Lamine Loum,

IDRC/ACACIA Exposition on ICTs and decentralisation, 7th 9th November 1999, Dakar

According to the Acacia programme officer at that time, Mr Alioune Camara, "the project's objective was not to amend the decentralisation law, but to show how ICTs can help improve its implementation, through partnership between the government and the various players".

This was confirmed by the project manager, "the project was not intended to influence decentralisation policy directly, but to develop tools that, if used by local officials, could lead to changes in that policy, specifically through transparent management of local budgets, and through access to official documents on decentralisation".

Nevertheless, we may say that, even if the project was not intended to influence decentralisation policy directly, it has produced tools that, if put to use, could improve its implementation, something that is a strategic development objective of the government.

As indicated in the evaluation report of the SAS, three major mechanisms were included in the project for influencing decentralisation policy:

1. Capacity building:

This involved producing knowledge, by developing applications to meet different management and organisational needs generated by decentralisation (software for local government management, local budget management, civil registry management, etc.); publicising the results and outputs of the project among local officials; and undertaking a study on implementing the observatory on local governance and decentralisation.

2. Broadening the project's influence:

This was done essentially by publicising information and documentation on decentralisation by posting online the major legislation and regulations governing decentralisation, and information on the field of local government.

3. Sensitisation and information for local officials, elected representatives and citizens:

In this connection, the project provided information about the major laws and regulations governing decentralisation, translated them into national languages and posted them online. Moreover, the results were highly disseminated by demonstrating the products to organisations and potential users.

All these activities were conducted during the last phase of the project and continued afterward. But, the products and results of the project have not been used with any noticeable impact on public policies at the local level, reflecting in part, according to Mr. Lô, at that time National President of the Rural Community Presidents' Association, and one of the key players in decentralisation policy, and currently President of the Association of Local Elected Representatives, "the communications gap, and the absence of public activities for disseminating those results and products".

5.3.2. Obstacles and challenges from Research to Practice

But in reality, as we have seen, the project has involved, since its conception, various players in the decentralisation policy and many authorities have been in contact with the products developed by the project, nationally and even internationally, on the occasions of visits, tests and demonstrations. Moreover, numbers of players and political authorities have used the voice server or have consulted the project's web site. All of these authorities and policymakers found the project's products to be useful.

In particular, following several presentations of the products and a successful test in the Records Automation Division, the Minister of the Interior, at the time, proposed the use of the civil registry software. In the words of the Director of Local Government at the time, Mr. Mamadou Diouf, "the civil registry software is a good product that should be made available to the communes". But no steps have been taken as yet, however, to follow through with this initiative.

At the same time, with respect to the software on budget management, the Associations of local officials welcomed the products. Therefore, the Agency for Municipal Development (ADM) invited SAFEFOD to test the software in three municipalities of different sizes: Dakar, Joal-Fadhiout and Kaffrine. The tests were conducted successfully with the Agency experts, and they decided to acquire the product. Being supported by the World Bank, ADM asked its donor to authorise the purchase of the budget software for the communes. But this recommendation has not been followed up.

After that, another international donor was contacted by SAFEFOD and was ready to provide all the municipalities/communes with basic computer equipment and the budget management software. However, a request from the President of the National Association of Mayors was required. According to the Project Manager, the President of the Association did not want to sign the request, apparently without any specific reason for not doing so.

With regard, to the vocal server, the then chief of staff of the Minister of Scientific and Technical Research, noting that it could be used to access a database with administrative, economic, political and cultural information on various local governments, went so far as to ask that SAFEFOD products be incorporated into the government's "voice and data" project in late 1999.

But none of this happened, why? Which are the main obstacles that, although national and local decision makers were informed of the applications developed during the project and some of them attended the demonstration sessions and showed their interest, impede the products of the project to be systematically used in the daily activities of local governments?

Why, although the results of the research were considered successful, the output, and in particular the management software, were not applied?

From analysis of the interviews and discussion with the key actors involved in the project and in the decentralisation policy at large, it emerged that the unsuccessful transition from research to action was in part because of the changes that happened in the political regime in 2000.

In fact, in 2000, after national elections, the so called "alternance era" in Senegal arrived and a new government was established. This of course caused, as in many cases when there is a change of government, a delay in reorganising all policies, as well as a change of orientations and the will to start everything from zero.

Therefore, SAFEFOD, changed its approach and established a "joint venture" with a private company (namely OCTIS) to have a more market-oriented strategy and to negotiate commercial agreements with the key Ministries involved in the decentralisation process.

Yet during the interviews with representatives of the current Government and the newly established Association of Local Elected Representatives (that associates the representatives of the Association of Rural Community Presidents, Association of Mayors of Senegal, and Association of Regional Council Presidents), they expressed an interest in examining these products to see how useful they might be for local governments.

In fact, to date, there is still no concrete advance in the use of ICTs at local government level. A recent survey conducted by the SAFEFOD/OCTIS joint-venture in 43 municipalities in the main region of Dakar shows that none of them uses a computer to manage the registry system, and there is no specialised software used for the budget management (only a minority of them use Excel software). The results of this survey confirm the same conclusions that were reached by the IDRC SAS in 1997. This is also a confirmation of the difficulty of applying the results of research, especially if innovative due to the context, to produce concrete changes in the governance system.

In the light of its results, SAFEFOD's project can definitely be considered "pioneeristic", and in fact, the needs that were explored during the research phase are still required today.

There are some attempts to fill the gap, but still a lot needs to be done, especially the following of an integrated and co-ordinated policy. For example, according to Mr Mohamadou Kabir Sow, the new Director-General of the Agency for Municipality Development (ADM), following the demonstrations of SAFEFOD's products, the ADM decided to develop its own software in-house, and at present, with the support of the World Bank, it is installing basic computer equipment in all the 110 municipalities in Senegal. After being equipped, at least with a Personal Computer, the ADM intends also to provide the budget management software currently under testing and revision. It was in fact developed from an existing product in MS-DOS.

This is witness to the fact that, according to Mr Cheickhou Amadou Diop, Senior Financial Analyst Expert of ADM, thanks to ACACIA and SAFEFOD's Project, the not yet clearly expressed needs of local governments were taken into effective account, and the possibility of providing a solution by developing ICTs tools was analysed as a concrete option.

If we consider that, even and especially at local level, governance is a highly information-intensive practice, notwithstanding the limitation of government structures, ICTs can be highly beneficial, providing a service to local administration by making management simpler and more transparent.

In this regard, one of the issues that is not easily discussed, but that is clearly part of the problem under analysis, is the fact that, especially at local level, there is a widespread bad practice of "charging" users for normally due administrative services, or just to facilitate a procedure.

This abuse, would of course be more difficult to do in the presence of automised and transparent ICTs tools. But, according to the majority of the interviewees, the so called by some "collateral costs" on public management, are not the main obstacles to introduce ICTs in government at local level. In fact, it seems that, even if this practice is still a "rule" in many cases, there is less and less resistance to change and, actually, there is a growing awareness by local elected representatives of the benefits that ICTs can bring to support local development.

5.3.3. Lessons Learned

The main objective of this project was to explore how ICTs could help local officials improve local government management and to broadcast the results of this research. It is a clear and necessary goal especially if we consider the products that have been developed. They are very simple but extremely useful software products to help manage daily procedures. As indicated by a statement by Prof. Sylla, "they represent les fundamentaux....(the fundamentals) for any public management. And that was the starting point for SAFEFOD's Project".

"How can you govern any administration if you cannot manage correctly and in time the budget, or you don't even know what is the population? Which is the civil status of citizens, and so on?"

But, as it emerged in the analysis of this case, in many local governments, there are many other issues that may be considered more important, and so introducing ICTs cannot be considered a "priority among priorities". This is especially true where financial resources are limited and the purchase of ICTs, even if basic, would at the beginning bring more problems than solutions. Who will use it? How will people be trained? What about the costs and time of maintenance and repair if there are problems? How fast do these ICTs become obsolete? What about the cost of replacement?

All these questions pose the problem of the return on investment on ICTs that each local administrator has to face when making a decision and, at the same time, facing the consensus of the population that, in many cases, has other more concrete difficulties to solve.

In addition to this, these local governments, it must be remembered, are answerable to the central government and must apply policy measures decided at the national level. Moreover, the local level must adapt these policy measures to the conditions in the communities they represent. And as we have already underlined, in many cases there is a lack of basic infrastructures and therefore the decision of the local government to buy computer equipment could be seen as a nonsense.

In this regard, moreover, there is another psychological or cultural aspect to take into consideration. As in many other developing countries, Senegal in particular, benefits from a large amount of aid for development. Going around Dakar you can see a representation of almost all the development agencies and donors, from Canada to the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg.... As well as many local governments from industrialised countries that are willing to participate in decentralised-co-operation initiatives. This situation, according to some of the interviewees, could hide a sort of "culture of assistance"... thus making administrators or elected representatives, especially at local level, looking for aid instead of investing in their own future. And in the case of ICTs, in particular, it is rare to find a local government that purchases its own equipment instead of waiting for a donation or the intervention of the central government.

All this of course is enormously delaying the process of integration of ICTs into local governments, although, according to the majority of interviewees, it seems that local governments and their populations are "ready" to introduce and use ICTs.

Of course it is a readiness in terms of not being reluctant, but there is still not readiness in terms of capacity to manage the ICTs, and especially the changes that ICTs bring about. In this regard, it still requires a lot of training, not only at the technical level, but also with regard to reorganisation and communication skills. For this reason, a specific Unit of Technical Assistance to the National Association of Local Elected Representatives (CAEL) has been established and, according to its Director, Ms Sall, many activities are now underway to build the capacities of Local Elected Representatives and support the transition into the Information Society.

At the same time, this project that was based essentially on creating applications and contents which could be used by decision makers at the local level, thus helping to bridge the communication gap and provide access to useful information, was not aimed directly at changing policies. But, as we have seen, the use and adoption of its products could help local decision makers to take better account of the needs of their voters, particularly in terms of sound planning.

There is therefore a great potential impact of this kind of activity for local governance development and in particular in making policy-makers aware and capable of better managing public affairs, with an increase in transparency, accountability and participation of the citizens, thus strengthening public sector efficiency and democracy.

In particular, ranked within the category of policy-makers, we can differentiate between politicians or officials, in the light of the degree of their involvement in the policy preparation process. The present case indicates clearly that the successful introduction of ICTs in governance, at local level, needs the clear commitment and involvement of both categories. A strong leadership at the political level is required, to champion and take the correct decisions, but at the same time, the participation of the administrator, both in developing the applications and contents in the phase of research, and in managing the transition from research to practice is fundamental.

Without this mixed approach the difficulties that we have seen in this case, in solidly implementing the solution, can be experienced. In addition to this, and to better face the obvious problem of resistance to change that is implicitly connected to any innovation, there is the need of an effective and strong communication policy to disseminate the results of the research and immediately apply, if useful and agreed. Otherwise, there is the risk that too many research activities remained "locked in the drawers" and the potential benefit for communities is not exploited as it should be.

In this connection, a clear recommendation that emerged from analysis of the interview, and in particular discussing the issue with representatives of the Delegation on Public Management, of the Presidency of the Republic, Mr Tidiane Sow, Adviser in Management, and Mr Amadou Sadio, Advisor in Organisation and also Mayor of Thionck-Essyl, is the need of a more effective coordination of the activities related to decentralisation and local governance, especially when it comes to a significant investment such as the introduction of ICTs.

In fact, the role of ICTs for local governance being well established, the issue is now how to efficiently manage this process in a cost-effective manner, and how to integrate and coordinate the efforts of all the different stakeholders involved in the implementation of the decentralisation policy. In this regard, even if it resulted in being not completely successful, the project under analysis demonstrated an interesting approach, where participation and discussion were open and a mechanism of partnership was established to share experiences and ideas and find common solutions. A possibility for the successful implementation of the decentralisation policy in Senegal, as well as in many other African countries, should definitely take into consideration this recommendation.

As for the technical aspects of the project, it should be noteworthy to emphasise the local-based development of contents and applications, and the importance given to the "language-divide". Often, in fact, solutions are just imported from elsewhere and they result in not being in line with local requirements or not at all compatible with the technical systems in place. The issue of language and the capacity to access (accessibility), including the costs, are important factors that, if not solved, can prevent any introduction of ICTs at local level. They should be considered as a "pre" condition for any local governance activity.

5.3.4. Towards a local governance observatory

The long-term objective of the IDRC's funded project was the institution of the "Observatory on Local Governance and Decentralisation". After its establishment, and despite all the difficulties that we mentioned before in relation to the concrete application of the products developed during the research, in the years that followed, SAFEFOD continued working on the development of the observatory, monitoring the implementation of the decentralisation-policy in Senegal and supporting some of the activities undertaken at local level, especially in the rural communities, in partnership with the local and central governments and the civil society, trying to adopt its "model of local governance" which it had developed.

Moreover, during the elaboration and first investigations of this "model of local governance", it appeared that what could not be ignored were the realities of development problems and which are of concern to all the actors involved. It is for this reason that the model, while giving priority to training, needed to take into consideration the necessary contribution to removing certain institutional and material obstacles at the level of deconcentrated structures (deputy prefects) and decentralised structures (local representatives) and community organisations, for a more effective development, which is sine-qua-non for the smooth running of governance.

Development support, which goes with training in project conception and implementation, targets not only these institutional constraints, but also productive investments, women groups and youth organisations, as well as various programmes such as health and the registry system.

In this regard, according to Ms. Soukeyna Ndiaye Ba, Minister of Decentralised Co-operation and Regional Planning "we still have to improve communication in all directions (grassroots communities, government, development partners), educate local elected officials (literacy problems), associate ICTs with traditional means of communication".

Yet, Prof. Sylla and SAFEFOD's team are confident that the potential effects of the project on public policies should become evident with a further communication campaign to inform the new local leaders elected in 2001, who would be more open to innovation, especially through instituting the civil registry software in all municipalities in Senegal.

In addition to this, and thanks to OXFAM/America, SAFEFOD established in 2003 the first antenna of the observatory implementing a project in the rural community of Barkedji, in the Louga Region in Senegal. This first "pilot" of a local observatory on local governance was aimed at ensuring the follow-up of experiences and strengthening the capacities of decentralised authorities and the civil society with a view to effectively promoting good governance through an optimal use of ICTs and media channels.

In the long-term, the observatory on local governance was intended to develop and manage data bases on decentralisation and local governance, on the basis of an exhaustive collection of the most pertinent information on decentralisation in general and the management of renewable natural resources and services, in particular local democracy, the functioning of local institutions, budget management, reports and decisions of local bodies, local development plans, etc. This information would be e-processed, translated into the national dialects and appropriately stored, with a view to circulating it widely to grassroots actors, policymakers and other national and international partners. This would be done through adapted and appropriate information products and services (reviews, films, soundtracks, interactive CD-Rom, etc.). In the pilot experience in Barkedji, a newspaper, called "Eerango", was published in the Fula language.

At the same time, the observatory was intended to accompany the process of ICTs appropriation by local governments, and disseminate information and sharing experiences, through organising fora in which all stakeholders could exchange their views, ideas and practices.

In this way, the intention of establishing an observatory bolstered by the civil society was to ensure the setting up of an information system on local governance that would support local governance development and strengthen local democracy.

Notes

1. Loi n° 96-06 du 22 mars 1996 portant code des collectivités locales.

2. The programming documents are the following: Plan Régional de Développement Integrée (PRDI); Plan d'Investissements Communaux (PIC); Plan Locaux de Développement (PLD).

3. Le Programme national de Bonne Gouvernance (PNBG), Délégation au Management Public, Secrétariat Général de la Présidence de la République, Janvier 2003.

4. L'Agence De l'Informatique de l'Etat (ADIE), established by Presidential «décret: n° 2004-1038 du 23 juillet».

5. Inauguration de l'Intranet Gouvernemental, Projet Intranet Gouvernemental (PING), Dakar, 15 mars 2005.

6. This workshop was jointly organized by the Presidency of the Republic, Delegation on Public Management, Ministry of Local Government and Decentralisation, and the SAFEFOD Project and recommendations for incorporating its results into the PNBG were presented by G. Misuraca.

7. Prof. Yero Sylla, Executive Secretary SAFEFOD, "ICTs and Local Governance in Senegal: a Challenge to Civil Society Organizations", Presentation to the IDRC/UNECA Workshop on "Innovative applications of ICTs for local governance in Africa", Addis Ababa, 7th.-9th. June, 2004; and Interviews by Gianluca Misuraca.

8. A specific evaluation of the overall ACACIA activities in Senegal was conducted by IDRC in January 2003, while a more detailed study of the impact of SAS was got under way by an independent consultant and was to be available before the end of 2005.

9. La Revue de la Gouvernance Locale, published every three months by SAFEFOD.

References

CRDI/IDRC, Working papers of the ACACIA Working group in Governance, 1997;

CRDI/IDRC, Introductory Note of the President of the ACACIA Working group in Governance, Prof. Yero Sylla, 1997;

CRDI/IDRC, Document de Projet n. 65199/97-8153-01, «Le rôle des technologies de l'Information et de la communication dans la mise en ouvre de la politique de décentralisation au Sénégal», 1997;

CRDI/IDRC, Fiche de Projet 97-8153-01, Rôle des TIC dans la mise en oeuvre de la politique de décentralisation au Sénégal 1997;

CRDI/IDRC, Financial and Monitoring Reports of the Project n. 65199/97-8153-01, «Le rôle des technologies de l'Information et de la communication dans la mise en ouvre de la politique de décentralisation au Sénégal», 1998;

CRDI/IDRC, Senegal Strategic Assessment, The policy influence of projects financed by IDRC's Acacia program: The Case of Senegal, by Mr. Khamathe Sene, and Ms. Ramata Thioune, January 2003;

République du Sénégal, Loi n° 96-06 du 22 mars 1996 portant code des collectivités locales;

République du Sénégal, Délégation au Management Public, Secrétariat Général de la Présidence de la République, Programme national de Bonne Gouvernance (PNBG), Janvier 2003;

République du Sénégal, Présidence de la République, Décret: n° 2004-1038 du 23 juillet sur l'Agence De l'Informatique de l'Etat (ADIE);

République du Sénégal, Présidence de la République, l'Agence De l'Informatique de l'Etat (ADIE), Présentation de l'INTRANET Gouvernemental, pendant l'Inauguration du Projet Intranet Gouvernemental (PING), Dakar, 15 mars 2005;

République du Sénégal, Discours Inaugural sur l'INTRANET Gouvernemental, de S.E. Maître Abdoulaye Wade, Président de la République du Sénégal, Dakar, 15 mars 2005;

République du Sénégal, Ministère de la Co-opération Décentralisée et de la Planification Régionale, Plan d'Action, 2005;

SAFEFOD, Cahier des charges pour le laboratoire de gouvernance locale, document de travail, Projet n. 65199/97-8153-01, «Le rôle des technologies de l'Information et de la communication dans la mise en ouvre de la politique de décentralisation au Sénégal», Octobre 1998;

SAFEFOD, Rapport du Séminaire de Partenariat organisée par la SAFEFOD et le CRDI sur le rôle des technologies de l'Information et de la communication dans la mise en ouvre de la politique de décentralisation au Sénégal, 25 février 1999;

SAFEFOD, Press Review, 1998-2000;

SAFEFOD/OCTIS, Présentations des logiciels CAURI, CIVIS, GESTEC et MERCES, 2004;

SAFEFOD/OXFAM-America, "Décentralisation, Gouvernance Démocratique et Participation en milieu rural", 2003, 2004;

Sylla Prof. Yero, Executive Secretary SAFEFOD, "ICTs and Local Governance in Senegal: a Challenge to Civil Society Organizations", Presentation to the IDRC/UNECA Workshop on "Innovative applications of ICTs for local governance in Africa", Addis Ababa, 7-9 June 2004;

Union des Associations d'Elus Locaux, Cellule d'Appui aux Elus Locaux, «Rapport Annuel 2003-2004» et présentation, 2004;

6
ICTs AND TRADITIONAL GOVERNANCE IN GHANA

6.1. CONTEXT AND POLICY

6.1.1. Modern versus Traditional authority: implications on Governance

A major challenge for most of Africa is the quest for good governance. This quest must take into consideration the dual "mixed" nature of the system of governance that is inherent in African local culture and due to its historical evolution.

On the one hand, is the western or European model of governance that has been "imported" with colonisation. On the other hand, is the traditional or indigenous form of governance, which evolved out of the history, tradition and culture of the people. Furthermore, the traditional or indigenous institutions, within which context traditional governance operates, are defined and linked to diverse ethnic identities, and to the perception of governance held by various ethnic groups.

Ghana has more than 40 ethnic groups and within these groups is a variety of forms and institutions. These include priestly authority, female traditional authority in the forms of Queen Mothers, female Chiefs and priestesses, traditional military companies, indigenous health delivery, agriculture and commercial authority. At the apex of these structures of governance is the institution of Chieftaincy, which permeates through all the 40 or so ethnic groups, limited only in power and influence by the history, tradition and culture of the various communities where the authority is exercised.

In pre-colonial times, traditional institutions were entirely responsible for governance, and Chiefs played a crucial and leading role in most municipalities in Africa. The advent of colonial rule introduced western forms of governance that, today, with their accompanying political and administrative structures, dominate at the national and regional levels. However, at the district and community levels they share the responsibility of governance with traditional authority, mainly that of the Chiefs. In rural communities, for example, inadequate infrastructure and poverty hamper access to modern or state agencies of security, justice and health. In such a situation, the chief assumes a very central role to the people, being therefore a vital and strategic partner for development. Under colonial rule and post-colonial governments, traditional institutions of governance suffered erosion of their authority. Now that the government, Chiefs and the people were rising to the challenges of modernisation, democratisation and the role of the chief as an agent of development, a new initiative was needed to facilitate and accelerate growth of a system of governance sensitive to the culture and history of Ghana. This may provide the answers for stability, alternative dispute resolution, peace-building, poverty alleviation and wealth generation.

But while western institutions of governance have been able to adjust to some of the challenges brought by modernisation, traditional forms of governance have been slow to respond to change.

The pressure due to globalisation and the democratisation process blowing through Africa is now strongly addressing the need to consider the duality of the mixed nature of the system of governance in Africa.

Chiefs have been asking for integration of the traditional system into mainstream governance, and at the same time, the role of indigenous institutions, in relation to the modern state, was receiving increasing attention and has been the subject of seminars, conferences, workshops and publications. In this context, it has also to be considered that Chiefs are now transforming their role, being often young and well educated people, able to fully grasp the advantages of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and global knowledge.

6.1.2. Traditional Governance and its role for Democratic Consolidation

The significance of traditional governance in Ghana has been such that the various constitutions of the country have guaranteed its existence and operation. The Chieftaincy Act of 1971, for example, sets out the guidelines for the functioning of the various Houses of Chiefs and mandates the National House of Chiefs to undertake the progressive study, interpretation and codification of customary laws. The 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Ghana continues to recognise and guarantee the institution, although it bans Chiefs from participating in partisan politics.

To facilitate the administration of the diverse traditional authorities and units and as evidence of the importance attached to the institutions of traditional governance, the Government of Ghana has been maintaining a regulatory unit in charge of Chieftaincy Affairs at the national level, referred to as the "Chieftaincy Secretariat". It is in effect the Chieftaincy Division of the Office of the President, thus part of the Presidency and under the seat of the Government. In addition to the Secretariat, there is a National House of Chiefs, ten Regional Houses of Chiefs (representing each region of the country) and 165 Traditional Councils, representing each traditional area. The 1992 Constitution paid special attention to Chieftaincy, guaranteeing its protection. Moreover, in 2003, the President of the Republic John Agyekum Kuffour, set up a special Presidential Commission of Chieftaincy Affairs.

The constitutional guarantees reflect the relevance of traditional governance in modern democratic governance and clearly justified the inclusion of the institution in any discourse on nation building and development. That the inability of the central government to follow through on its policies and development agenda in the remotest parts of the country has created a leadership and authority vacuum is indisputable. For instance, in rural communities, as a consequence of this, most people living in the rural areas of the country resort to the chief's palace in matters of dispute pertaining to domestic and non-domestic conflict situations, rather than to the law courts or the police station, which either do not exist or do not enjoy the confidence and trust of the people.

Moreover, research on the subject revealed that Ghanaian perception of Chieftaincy is positive. There is no doubt that traditional governance has a lot to offer. Its incorporation into mainstream governance can maximise the utilisation of traditional leadership, which represents a rich human resource, bringing into focus the broader issues and links between governance, culture and development.

The traditional authorities, as custodians of the land and other natural resources, play a critical role in the economic activities of the people, such as farming, mining, construction, etc. Traditional leaders, as guardians of the history and culture of the people, are thus regarded as one of the crucial echelons of leadership through which the Ghanaian development agenda of poverty reduction and wealth creation could be achieved.

A survey in 2001 covering all the regions of Ghana, indicated that there was considerable goodwill towards the institution of Chieftaincy among the majority of Ghanaians. Indeed they claim that the institution needs support from the state.

Of course, any attempt to incorporate traditional governance into mainstream constitutional rule required some preparation and capacity building for the incumbents and the counterparts (executive, judiciary, legislative, civil society and other stakeholders).

6.1.3. The Ghana ICTs for Accelerated Development Policy (ICT4AD)

In line with the worldwide recognition of the developmental opportunities and the challenges emerging from the "information age", Ghana, was exploring ways of facilitating its development process through the deployment and exploitation of ICTs within its economy and society.

The Ghana ICT4AD Policy charted a roadmap for the nation's development in the emerging knowledge-based economy, representing the Vision for Ghana in the Information Society.

The Policy Statement is based on an extensively researched framework document that analysed and crystallised the challenges facing the country and made a case for an ICTs-led socio-economic development agenda for the country.

The Strategic Policy was designed to aid Ghana's development process by contributing to addressing the nation's key developmental challenges, with the aim of transforming the country in a middle income, information-rich, knowledge based and technology-driven economy and society by 2022. To facilitate this process, 14 priority areas constituting the pillars of the policy were identified as targets and, for each of those, objectives and strategies were stated.

To implement the policy several 4-year rolling plans were envisaged, as well as periodic revisions and the establishment of co-ordinating agencies and co-operating mechanisms.

In fact, despite the consistent strategic document highlighting in detail the policy goals and objectives, and the broad strategic lines of interventions, as well as the key drivers and focus areas, the process is still at the beginning and a concrete implementation policy would require a much committed and disruptive intervention to realise the potential of the strategic document.

The document also briefly analyses the current situation, and it is clear that Ghana is characterised by a weak policy, infrastructural and regulatory framework of ICTs, as well as the general challenges/opportunities in developing countries, such as in particular the educational and human capacity level, with regard to the demographic indicators: Ghana has a relatively high population growth rate (2,5%); relatively youthful (60% under 25 years); with an illiteracy rate of about 40% and only 3% of population with tertiary level education; with a high school drop-out rate and about 50% of junior secondary school leavers. In general, close to 40% of Ghanaians currently live below the poverty line of less than 1$ per day, with an unequal geographic distribution, where five out of ten of the country's regions have a much higher percentage of their population living in poverty.

If we look at the economic indicators, moreover, the Ghanaian economy has not experienced a major structural transformation since independence, and the majority of the working population (60%) is still actively involved in agriculture, with only 13% in industry and 28% in services. These sectors are still narrow and underdeveloped. The informal private sector is by far the largest employment sector. Job creation in the economy is extremely low with only 15% of employment in public and private sector organisations, while 68% of the population with jobs are self-employed. There is also a general human resource problem in the lack of technical and managerial skills, especially in the area of ICTs, and academic and R&D capacity is limited. Finally, the national debt is a major impediment to economic development, exceeding the annual average gross national income per capita, that is 340US$, lower than the average for Sub-Saharan African countries.

Therefore, the aspiration to accelerate Ghana's socio-economic development will require a double figure growth rate, thus an extraordinary effort, to transform the economic trend.

However, it is worth noting that the development of this policy was based on an extensive nationwide consultation with stakeholders from the public and private sectors, the academic community as well as civil society, including members of various political parties.

In this context, a specific role has been given to the Chieftaincy Institutions that, albeit at the beginning were not fully involved, and thanks to the growing debate around the role of Chiefs as "agents for local development", have now been integrated, on a national level, in the process of the development of the ICT4AD Policy and its Strategic implementation.

In this regard, the publication in 2003 and dissemination in 2004 (also using CD-Rom) of the ICT4AD Policy was a strong signal of the Government's commitment to ICTs deployment to cover all sectors of the economy and a starting point for implementation.

Following the massive consultation and the effort of co-ordination of strategies and policies at central level, to address the challenges identified in the policy document steps were initiated in 2004 to develop strategies, especially in commerce and trade, education, agriculture, governance, health and gender. In September 2004, all sector Ministries and Regional Consultative Councils validated their ICTs Policies to enable them to focus on priority development areas where ICTs solutions could be applied to allow sectors to carve out a niche in the digital landscape and also create a greater interaction with citizenry. During 2005 it was expected to consolidate the strategy frameworks through stakeholders discussions to facilitate the development of a National ICTs Plan, for the period 2005-2008.

Some of the indicative programmes and action lines identified include the following:

– developing the requisite capacity in ICTs skills to promote the rapid deployment of ICTs;

– establishing the Ghana ICTs Directorate (GICTeD) to serve as an operational body to promote a cohesive and structured strategy for e-governance and other e-initiatives, part of ICT4AD;

– implementing the Ghana Multimedia Centre to promote ICTs as a driver of Private Sector development, facilitating integration and use of ICTs in business development;

– developing a Technology Park to promote a comprehensive framework for ICTs integrated services and collaboration between the Private Sector and Research Centres;

– liberalising the telecommunications sector in order to revitalise it and make it effective and competitive. In this regard, the transformation of the National Communication Authority is also pursued in order to make it more independent in its operations;

– facilitating the integration of disparate communications infrastructure into a common backbone, in order to open up the entire country and indeed the sub-regions, to receive access to telecoms, especially promoting Public Private Partnerships (PPPs);

– enhancing the teledensity, by increasing the number and penetration of fixed and mobile lines. From December 2003, in one year, the penetration rate growth of over 100%: from 4% (800,000 people given a population of 20 million) to 9,1% (1,835,000 people). In 2005 it was expected to achieve 15% penetration rate;

– make access available to all Secondary Schools (then connectivity was available in about 50% of the towns with secondary schools and training colleges); also developing financial mechanisms for "last mile coverage";

– creating the Ghana Investment Fund for Telecommunications (GIFTEL) to generate funds to support the development of infrastructure in the underserved areas;

– promoting the universal service obligation of the postal sector and transforming the Meteorological Services Department into a semi-autonomous Agency;

Finally, with specific regard to the theme under discussion, the Ministry of Communications was to introduce Community Information Centres (CICs) in all 230 electoral constituencies across the country. They will provide the communities with direct access to ICTs facilities, thus supporting development in remote and rural areas.

6.1.4. The National Decentralisation Action Plan (NDAP)

Decentralisation, as a policy option, has been on Ghana's political agenda since independence. The Government of Ghana embarked upon the implementation of a comprehensive Decentralisation Policy and local government reform programme in 1988, aiming at establishing efficient, decentralised, government machinery as a means to providing strong support for participatory development. The process of decentralisation in Ghana involved a mixture of political devolution enshrined in the constitution, as well as administrative and technical de-concentration of key service delivery institutions which were in part backed by law and in the main reflecting conventional practices.

However, the smooth implementation of the policy has been constrained by inadequate resources, ineffective collaboration and the lack of well-focussed programmes for the short, medium and long term. While the institutional and legal framework for decentralisation have made modest progress since the establishment of the District Assemblies and the operation of the District Assembly Common Fund in 1992, support to deepen and institutionalise the efforts of the government have been incoherent, in part due to several uncoordinated projects and the divergent approaches used for their implementation.

Analysis of the current situation, in fact, highlights the existence of two competing concepts of decentralisation operating in Ghana. The first is the devolution of major political and administrative responsibilities from Central Government to District Assemblies, comprising partially elected bodies with the mandate for local government and community development. The second, running parallel to devolution intentions is the process of administrative and technical de-concentration practised by Ministries, Departments and Agencies, that plan and deliver specific services to communities. Devolution has far-reaching implications for political, administrative and technical set-up, proposing to restructure institutions and mandates for service delivery. De-concentration, on the other hand, in Ghana has involved the rearrangement simply of the locations of key personnel and where their functions are delivered.

At the centre of the debate there is of course the issue of accountability, both of government and service providers to citizens, in particular the poor and disadvantaged communities.

In this connection, the commitment to decentralisation has received renewed attention since the completion of the Poverty Reduction and Growth Strategy in 2001, (GPRS).

As the implementation of this strategy and its associated programmes commenced, a National Decentralisation Action Plan (NDAP) has been developed under the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development leadership. It aimed at re-invigorating national policy and institutions for decentralisation, guiding the strategic targeting of resources to poverty reduction efforts at the local level and promoting greater participation of key private sector, civil society and traditional authorities in the process of governance and development at the local level.

To begin this process, an Action Plan had been developed to reflect realistic goals agreed by key stakeholders and serve as a framework to shape detailed programming in the near future.

To guide the implementation of the Action plan four main programme areas were formulated:

1. Policy and Institutional Arrangements for Decentralisation Implementation;

2. District Development Funding Facility;

3. Capacity Building and Human Resources Development;

4. Partnership and Participation for Accountable Local Governance.

As part of the process of developing the strategic actions and framework for programming, the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development established a Decentralisation Secretariat and supported the formation of an Inter-Sectoral Working Group, comprising members from various Ministries, Departments and Agencies to support the implementation of the plan.

An important aspect of the implementation of the programme was the specific role given to civil society organisations, NGOs and the private sector, as well as traditional authorities, to collaborate in the development of partnership and participate in decentralisation efforts. But is it correct to give traditional institutions the same role of civil society organisations?

The domain of Chiefs is unquestionably local governance. In recognition of this, the 1957, 1960, and 1969 Constitutions of the Republic of Ghana provided for the institutional representation of Chiefs in local government structures. As we have seen, the 1992 Constitution did not. However, Art. 242 of the Constitution provides that the Chiefs can serve on District Assemblies only where they are nominated by the President.

This situation resulted in a distinction between the activities of the political heads of the districts in the modern and traditional systems of governance (i.e. District Chief Executives and Chiefs).

Some District Chief Executives in fact, do not consider consultation with Chiefs in the performance of their duties. Neither do some members of District Assemblies consult Chiefs in decision making. In consequence, Chiefs who were closest to their people at the local level were sometimes marginalised in the socio-political decision making process.

The debate was open and very controversial. It was advocated that Chiefs should be institutionally represented in District Assemblies and that the Act 370 of the Chieftaincy Act should be amended, to provide for District Houses of Chiefs. At central government level, it was also proposed to constitute an Upper House of Parliament consisting of Chiefs, following the British model of the House of Lords. On the other side, there were arguments for the exclusion of Chiefs from local institutions, for the reason that the Chiefs have not always conducted themselves well, not administering justice impartially and not being conscientious with regard to the management of resources. Furthermore, inclusion in local government structures was seen as undemocratic, because Chiefs are not popularly elected and, even though outwardly neutral, they invariably aligned themselves with political parties and have exhibited partisan tendencies, thus risking the inclusion of partisanship in local government structures. Considering that Chieftaincy institutions have been affected by endless litigation, this could be transferred into local government management, also there would be the chance that as Chiefs they may look to their own interests and not those of the people. In fact, one of the main reasons against the inclusion of Chiefs was that, where Chiefs conduct themselves well, their contribution to local level development could still be made outside statutory local government structures.

It was evident, in fact, that Chiefs, by their position, are the leaders of their people. They have naturally therefore been part of local governance, for example by mobilising people at the grassroots level for development. Thus, even though Chiefs are not popularly elected, their inclusion in local government structures can be seen as not incompatible with democratic practices, exactly because this would enhance popular participation. In fact, Chiefs, as the local managers of their lands, have ultimate responsibility for the local development. Subjects still look up to Chiefs for direction and leadership, and invariably judge the performance of Chiefs by the development projects that they initiate. In this regard, "Modern Chiefs" also started exploiting marketing solutions to provide information about their achievements1.

6.1.4.1. The "Modern Chief" and the potential of ICTs for Traditional Governance

In a communiqué issued in Accra, in January 2003, at an international conference on "Chieftaincy in Africa: Culture, Governance and Development", it was stated that:

– The Chieftaincy institution be assisted to enhance its profile as an integral and viable component of the contemporary socio-political structure in Ghana;

– The Chieftaincy institution be seen as a critical and indispensable partner in governance at the local level (Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies) and that the Constitution be amended to allow for institutional participation of Chiefs in Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies;

– The judicial functions of Chiefs be recognised, properly defined and enhanced;

– The Chieftaincy institution being central to the nation's cultural heritage notes the importance of culture in development and calls for the urgent promulgation of a cultural policy;

– It was also requested that the Chieftaincy institutions be adequately resourced from the consolidated fund of the Government, and that their capacity building efforts be supported financially.

In respect of these calls for support, the enhancement of the active role of traditional leaders in governance was however far from being unanimous. There were in fact dissenting voices which pointed to the anachronistic nature of the institutions of traditional authorities, underlining that:

– The military role of traditional leaders has been taken over by a modern national army;

– The judicial functions of traditional leaders have been rendered superfluous by the extension of the modern judicial system into the traditional areas;

– Traditional leaders have lost their administrative functions, given the emergence of new local government structures in the traditional areas;

– Traditional leaders' legislative functions have become redundant with the establishment of the Parliament and District Assemblies which are respectively empowered to make laws for the nation as a whole and for the District;

– The economic resources once available to traditional leaders for the promotion of prosperity in their areas of authority are now no longer available to them;

– The institution of traditional leadership is bedevilled with conflict and disputes in connection with land and succession.

Despite these detractions, the potential of Chieftaincy for effective leadership was not in doubt, even if they seemed to operate in parallel, and in some cases in contradiction to the governance agenda of the central government. The reason is that Ghanaian society is still predominantly traditional in spite of the ongoing transition to modernity. Given that only a mere 30% of the population is in fact really "modernised", the remaining 70% is predominantly traditional, still looking upon Chiefs as performing important religious and civil functions. In addition to this, central government has relied (and still does) on Chiefs as important links between them and people in rural and remote areas, and have utilised their offices in reaching out to the rural communities. Some Chiefs serve on Statutory Boards, others mediate in areas of conflict and disputes on behalf of government and generally act as cultural ambassadors for Ghana.

Moreover, in view of the lack of accessibility for the majority of Ghanaians to the regular judicial courts, the Chief's tribunal is often the only way to discuss disputes and litigations.

It was proposed to re-introduce the Chief's tribunal as part of the judicial system of Ghana, however, Chiefs must be introduced to new techniques in adjudication and conflict resolution, to the finer principles of the rule of law and the equality of everybody before the law and including some education in judicial process so that they can record and sign their decisions.

Given the above, it is clear that there was a clamour for a critical assessment of the aspects of the constitution dealing with traditional leadership. There is now a strong debate about the appropriate roles to be played by traditional leaders in the management of local and national resources, the mobilisation and involvement of communities as partners and stakeholders in development, the search for strategies for containment and resolution of conflict and creation of harmony and peace.

However, the general feeling was that the rather residual functions given to traditional leadership did not afford Chiefs the opportunity to play an effective role in modern governance. There was a need to redefine the roles that a traditional leader could play in order to make him/her an integral part of the modern governance paradigm. Chiefs must consider the opportune time for them to review traditional governance from within, to critique themselves and rid the institution of certain excess and aberrations, repair damages done to the image of the institution and to build its capacity towards integration into mainstream modern governance systems.

In this context, of great importance is the fact that the education background and profile of Chiefs in the modern era have improved considerably, while, at the same time, a regrettable trend in this encouraging development is the emergence of the phenomenon of the "absentee chief", which poses a great challenge to traditional governance.

Taken as a whole, in the diversity of the structures of traditional governance institutions and the different phenomena that characterise their development, there was the need for establishing a framework that would open and facilitate information flow and knowledge sharing. Key components of this framework, that would allow empowerment of Chief institutions, maximising their efficiency, in the light of the recognition as the embodiment of Ghanaian culture, and as a potential catalyst for development, are ICTs.

In fact, the Chief in his duties as the chief executive of his people, needs ICTs to carry out his day-to-day administrative responsibilities. Correspondence, memos to sub-Chiefs, registrars, secretaries and proceedings of meetings, accounts and all the features of modern bureaucracy are relevant to the modern day Chieftaincy. In their responsibility as development partners, Chiefs needed management supporting tools and baseline data on their locality and on the available human and material resources. Even when such information exists with the central "modern" government, it is invariably inaccessible to the Chief, and yet this is basic to the generation of revenue and attraction of investors.

Moreover, possibly even more important, is the fact that, the vast majority of local communities in Ghana are not "connected". In many cases there are not even fixed telephone lines and roads and transportation are very difficult, especially during the rainy season. It is therefore very complicated to travel and communicate, where sending a simple message could take some days to be delivered and at a high cost. The potential of introducing ICTs in this context would be of great advantage both in terms of cost savings and effectiveness.

In addition to this, much of Ghana's land is vested in the hands of Chiefs and traditional councils. The ownership of land and the way it is used have a far-reaching impact on communities, making traditional governance an important arena for economic development. Chiefs are involved with the exchange of land between persons and groups, thus the palace of the Chief must be able to record such transactions, and, of course, it is clear that there is the need and the potential support of the computerisation of archival records to preserve and disseminate information.

6.2. PROJECT ON "ICTS IN SUPPORT OF TRADITIONAL GOVERNANCE IN GHANA"

6.2.1. Background and Justification

In view of the role of Chieftaincy as a traditional institution, with pre-colonial roots, but that continues to occupy politico-social and cultural spaces in Ghana, as well as in many other African countries, and considering that it shares that space with modern state structures and the pan-ethnic institutions that came into existence in the colonial era, it was important to give room, especially after the Constitution of 1992, to different perspectives on the matter.

The need for a systematic study of the interface between Chieftaincy, governance and culture for a full exploitation of the potentials for development in Africa has long been acknowledged. This need has become all the more urgent with the gradual withdrawal of the state from several spheres of national life and the increasing promotion of civil society, community organisations and traditional forms of governance as ways for enhancing local level administration and popular participation in development.

For this reason, already in the nineties, continuing a tradition started many years before, in the University of Ghana, Legon, particularly the Institute of African Studies, there rose the challenge of integrating traditional and modern governance systems, studying and analysing new ways and tools to support traditional governance and culture for local development.

This "pioneeristic" attitude was, in particular that of Prof. Irene K. Odotei who, many years before the advent of the "knowledge society", was already using innovative technologies (such as recording and video) to record customs and disseminate the culture of the traditional systems.

To sustain and support the systematisation of these efforts, and considering the difficulties and sensitivity that are connected to the subject, in the late nineties, the Ford Foundation funded a project on "Chieftaincy, Governance and Development". The project aimed at research and documentation of the institution of Chieftaincy and its role in the general system of governance in the midst of rapid modernisation and globalisation. Its main objectives were the following:

– Conducting research into Chieftaincy and other complementary institutions;

– Integrating the best practice of Chieftaincy into mainstream modern democratic governance to achieve good governance;

– Integrating the studies of Chieftaincy into the academic programmes of the University;

– Capacity building and advocacy for the institutions of Chieftaincy;

– Running of workshops, seminars and short courses that affect good governance, leadership and development;

– Preservation of the intangible cultural heritage through computerisation of archival records in all the houses of Chiefs and traditional councils;

– Educating the public through exhibitions, the media, documentaries and other programmes.

The project started in 2000 with a piece of research on "Perceptions on Chieftaincy in Ghana", and was concluded with an International Conference on "Chieftaincy in Africa: Culture, Governance and Development", held in Accra in January 2003. The conference, organised with the support of other developmental partners in addition to the Ford Foundation, aimed at making the results of the project available to the international community and also to share in the researches that had been undertaken elsewhere in Africa. It brought together an impressive collection of Ghanaian and international intellectuals, academics, researchers, senior civil and public servants, Chiefs, queenmothers and their courtiers.

6.2.2. Strategy and Objectives

With the knowledge gained from the project on "Chieftaincy, Governance and Development", and other projects2, researches and studies, in May 2003, a new project on "Governance, Culture and Development" funded by the Open Society Initiative of West Africa (OSIWA) was initiated, to further implement various processes started in connection with the endeavour to modernise Traditional Governance with a more consistent introduction and use of ICTs.

In fact, already in the previous activities undertaken, it was clearly understood how record keeping for Chiefs and their councils is important, as it is their responsibility to implement decisions on behalf of the community. Beyond that, the Chief must document the decisions and reasons underpinning his choices for posterity. Indeed, it is the right of posterity to know the path that the community has taken and the reasons underlying a particular decision.

The value of archival records is now fully appreciated by Chiefs, their subjects and the public. Visits to archives to find information on decided cases that establish legitimacy to the office, statuses, ownership to land or the position of boundaries have become a common feature. Where such records exist, evidence is easily available, even if sometimes and notwithstanding that the records exist litigants have developed the habit of pulling out evidence from the files or planting "evidence" created by themselves to help them win the case.

Having realised the importance of records and the risk of deterioration they are subjected to, both manmade and environmental, the project focussed on enhancing the capacities of institutions of traditional governance to enable them to participate effectively in mainstream national governance.

Critical to this capacity building effort was the introduction of Chiefs and other key players in the Chieftaincy institution to the use of ICTs as tools for modernisation and effective governance. The global objective of the project was therefore to strengthen traditional governance institutions through the introduction of ICTs in their setting and in their operations.

To attain this goal, the specific objectives of the projects were as follows:

a) Use ICTs in the institutionalisation of the Chieftaincy and traditional governance institutions to help strengthen the inter-relations between them and citizens, between traditional governance institutions and central and local governance, thereby closing the democratic gap;

b) Use ICTs for capacity building for Chiefs, traditional governance institutions and their support staff. Their ability to provide documentation, effectively manage information serves as a crucial step towards cultural heritage preservation and knowledge building;

c) Use ICTs to generate greater awareness on traditional governance issues, thereby enabling citizens to gain access to such information in an accessible and user-friendly fashion;

d) Using information to prevent conflict and tension situations, usually due to land rights, because of the absence of systematic records that are not in the public domain.

The project also dealt with the critical interfacing of governance-related cultural issues of concern in Africa, namely: democracy; accountability and transparency; collective responsibility for peace, security and stability; indigenous knowledge; intellectual property rights; cultural preservation as well as the mandatory involvement and active participation of civil society in Africa's development process. To realise these policy concerns, however, there was obviously a need for greater creative research, training support and advocacy than is currently offered by a limited portion of the African academic community.

6.2.3. Rationale and Structure

The reasons underpinning the project were the overall constraints in terms of local economic development and the cultural traditions, and especially the nature of the transmission of indigenous knowledge, based on oral tradition, personal observation and experience, which leaves room for argument and disputes leading sometimes to litigation, armed conflict, death and destruction. An example of this is the crisis in the traditional state of Dagbon, in the Northern Region of Ghana, where as a result of factional fighting the King was beheaded, his palace burned and it costs the government a substantial amount of resources to keep the peace.

The ICTs support for traditional governance is thus an effort aimed at building the capacity of indigenous political institutions, to participate in modern governance, have access to information and knowledge as well as to share experiences among themselves and with other stakeholders.

Towards the achievement of these objectives, the activities of the project were decided using plans drawn up as a result of surveys conducted previously for the "Chieftaincy Governance and Development Project". There was a clear connection, in fact, between the research that was conducted in the previous activity, and the attempt to apply and implement solutions that were identified as having a potential positive impact, and using alternative technologies.

For this reason, the project was divided into two major areas of activities:

1) Training; and

2) Infrastructural Support for the Houses of Chiefs.

Training included, in particular, capacity building seminars for Chiefs, registrars and other staff on basic computer skills. This was an important task, as the registrars and support staff are mainly documentalists, record keepers and information managers in an otherwise oral society.

At the same time, their capacity to "produce" information was intended to make the process of traditional governance more accountable and transparent, and to "open the palace" to the general public.

With regard to the partnership between the traditional institutions and the modern state institutions, the introduction and use of ICTs was definitely seen as an effective tool for better co-operation and communication, in order to more effectively sustain local economic development.

In general, of course, all this aimed at solving disputes and preventing conflicts because in the absence of peace it is not possible to have any development.

On the other side, the need for equipment and a communications facility was a consequence of the pursuance of the global objective, in fact, to mention the obvious: "you cannot learn to drive without driving... and to drive you need a car....".

In all this process, what is worthy of note is that the Centre of Governance, Culture and Development of the University of Ghana, which was in charge of Project Management, in collaboration with the Culture, Education and Technology Network, CETNET, established specifically to take care of the ICTs part of the project, tried to ensure that all possible support was given to the stakeholders involved.

6.2.4. Organisation and Management Arrangements

Given the previous "multidisciplinary" experience of the University of Ghana in executing the Project on "Chieftaincy, Governance and Development", and in particular the Institute of African Studies and the Departments of History, Sociology, Political Sciences and Religion, the Project Management was assigned to the University itself.

In one way, it was considered to be a continuation, with a specific focus on ICTs, of the researches and activities that were started within the framework of studying and researching on traditional governance in the modern era.

The project, in fact, started in May 2003, only a few months after the presentation of the results of the previous project in the International Conference mentioned above. But, differently from other activities, in this case the project was based on a relatively small grant of a hundred and fifty thousand United States Dollars ($US 150,000.00) provided from the Open Society Initiative of West Africa (OSIWA) and required specific technical expertise and consulting in the area of ICTs. Given its limited budget and duration, one year, the project was intended to be a "pilot" initiative, mainly devoted to identifying the training needs and experiments on the applicability of some technical solutions, as well as defining the content of training and building capacity.

The resources of the Project were allocated as follows:

GDC, University of Ghana's Project "ICTs & Traditional Governance" – Budget:

Source: University of Ghana, Project Document

The team of researchers from the University of Ghana, identified to manage the programme was composed of the following experts:

1. Project Director: Prof. Irene Odotei;

2. Project Consultant: Prof. R. Addo-Fening;

3. Researchers: Prof. Albert Awedoba and Dr. Kofi Baku;

4. Project Assistant: Mr. Ebenezer Ayesu;

5. ICTs Consultant: Mr Saluji Nana Salluji, Nana Adu-Kwado I.

The team, led by Prof. Odotei, a researcher in culture and traditional governance in Ghana and a renowned historian, made an incredible effort in developing solutions and disseminating information about the activities of the project, often being "in-the-field", notwithstanding the sometimes prohibitive conditions for travelling and communicating.

To facilitate the exchange of data and communication among the people involved in the project, and to disseminate information about its activities, a sort of "Virtual Network" and a web site were established, under www.Chieftaincy.org

An evaluation of the project was also conducted and it reported the positive expression of the opinions of the administrators of the Houses of Chiefs on the project.

In this connection, the uniqueness of the project was especially in the management of activities, since it brought together two major developmental partners, academia through the University of Ghana and the traditional leadership institutions, in an endeavour to improve the quality of management and preserve the national cultural heritage through the use of ICTs.

This partnership has heightened the mutual benefit that the two institutions can draw from each other in their contribution to good governance and development and, at the same time, it also enhanced the image of the University of Ghana as an institution that reached out to share its knowledge and expertise and resources with another institution that needed to be modernised for good governance. For example, the Vice-Chancellor of the University proudly mentioned the project as an outreach programme among the achievements of the University in his annual Congregation speech. So also the president of the National House of Chiefs praised the project and OSIWA as valued partners in the development efforts of traditional governance.

What should also be underlined is the foresight of OSIWA and its dynamic leadership in supporting this project which can definitely be considered a beginning towards the full modernisation of the governance structure in Ghana and, in general, in Africa.

6.2.5. Activities and Results

1. Computer-Assisted Training Programme

A computer-assisted training programme was introduced to promote effective records management in the key Chieftaincy and traditional governance institutions, leading to the computerisation and automation of records from the Houses of Chiefs. Training and workshops on records management to sharpen knowledge of this subject, particularly through the use of computers in each of the regions of the country, were embraced by the Houses of Chiefs.

The project adopted a two-pronged approach: Preventive and Curative. Three major training workshops and two interactive seminars were held to teach staff about the importance of the records and to ensure diligent care of them, and to develop ICTs skills.

The beneficiaries of the training workshops were:

a) Secretaries from The Chieftaincy Secretariat, Central, Brong Ahafo, Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regional Houses of Chiefs;

b) Registrars of the National House of Chiefs, the Chieftaincy Secretariat and the various Regional Houses of Chiefs;

c) Registrars from 25 selected Traditional Councils.

After assessing and identifying the needs of different target groups, the content of the training focussed mainly on an introduction to computers, Internet, records management, preservation and intellectual property rights.

Interactive seminars were held for the following groups of Chiefs:

a) Chiefs in the Greater Accra Region;

b) Chiefs in the National House of Chiefs.

They were aimed at sensitising Chiefs on the potential of ICTs and on intellectual property rights. It was also a means of involving them to ensure success and sustainability for the project.

There is no doubt that the workshops had a positive impact on participants. Indeed, "a sizeable percentage admitted freely that they had never touched a computer before this training programme". Moreover, by the completion of the workshops, each of the participants had acquired an official email address within the domain: yourname@ Chieftaincy.org

This was intended to be a means for improving communication and exchange of documentation through the establishment of a "Traditional Governance and Information System (TGIS)".

Below are shown some pictures of the different training sessions:

Computer Assisted Training Programme

2. Digitisation of records and establishment of a central database

An important aspect of the project was the digitisation of the Records of the Houses of Chiefs, to be available for the public domain and to enable citizens' to access information and records more easily. These included records and data of critical importance to the history and development of the local communities and the country overall, such as information on indigenous knowledge, political philosophy, traditional laws, constitution and the customs and values of the people. Given the fact that they were generally in a deplorable state, and considering that today's ICTs made it possible to store and preserve records in ingenious ways, affording institutions and organisations a memory bank from which information is accessed and used, as and when required, it was decided not to preclude the institution of Traditional Councils from this great opportunity of knowledge packaging, storage and dissemination.

The process of digitisation initiated also entailed further capacity-building activities for the record keepers and support staff of these institutions.

The digitisation of records increased access to research resources for the people, the Chiefs, the academic community and other researchers, as well as prolonging the life of the original records. This is because important historical records were perishing and were in danger of being lost, due to inadequate storage facilities. The records which were in this poor state prevented easy access to relevant information that could help resolve for instance, the rampant land disputes which were plaguing and threatening the stability of the country and which could escalate into intra-ethnic or inter-ethnic conflicts.

Computers were therefore installed in the National House of Chiefs and the ten Regional Houses of Chiefs as well as in Traditional Councils so that automation and digitisation of records could begin. Given the very large amount of data and records, the project focussed in particular on the digitisation of the judgement books of the judicial committees and proceedings of the standing committees and the full houses. In fact, the management, preservation and dissemination of these data are of fundamental importance in boosting the efforts of Traditional Councils to reduce conflicts associated with traditional governance and culture.

For this purpose, due to the fact that the House of Chiefs undertakes judicial responsibilities, their records needed to be kept in databases for future reference in the interests of transparency and accountability via the Internet.

Under this activity a central database was created to initiate the smooth integration of systems across the regions to enable the various institutions to share the wealth of information available between themselves and the world at large besides ensuring the preservation of important historical data.

These are essential in the development of databases which would contribute to brokerage services for the traditional institutions to be treated by a multi-disciplinary team, and in order to generate discussions and produce publications on the primary material collected. This was intended to be an important resource in conflict situations and claims to land.

In this regard, as a result of these activities, the University of Ghana also provided information brokerage services to the general public as well as to serve the needs of Chiefs and the Houses of Chiefs. This was based on the fact that not all the Chiefs and Council Members would have access to computers and to the information stored in them so there was a need for the provision of such services as they dispense their duties in traditional justice cases.

3. Infrastructural support: the Traditional Governance and Information System (TGIS) (ICTs Equipment, Web Site and Wide Area Network System - WAN)

The most technological part of the research project focussed on investigating the possibilities of using alternative technologies for establishing a communications system among the traditional governance institutions, using new and affordable technologies, namely the Internet and Satellite communication, especially due to the poor accessibility in the remote areas of the country.

For this purpose, the possibility of creating a WAN (Wide Area Network) using a VSAT connection to offer interoperability among the various institutions across the WAN to the central database (server based at the University of Ghana) was investigated.

At the same time, a project website (www.Chieftaincy.org) was created to enhance networking and promote dialogue among traditional governance institutions in the country, as well as to stimulate academic research on governance, culture and development in the country, the rest of Africa and the world.

In terms of ICTs equipment support, the project acquired a customised server, equipped with a SCSI Ultra-Wide platform, a RAID system and utilising state-of-the-art Intel XEON processors to serve the impending network needs. The system unit is bundled with a redundant UPS and runs on the Microsoft Windows NT platform.

Customised Server running LINUX and a Presentation of ICT Equipment in a Regional House

All official permits covering Administrator and 15-Client licences have been acquired alongside the very stable UNIX platform, LINUX Redhat operating system to serve concurrently.

Six DELL Pc's platform, Pentium IV with standard packages inclusive of UPS and Printers, were purchased to serve the Chieftaincy Secretariat, the Central, Brong Ahafo, Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regional Houses of Chiefs.

The project also provided Flatbed, Pen Scanners and other equipment to the National House of Chiefs and the various regional offices. This was a key aspect of the project since it was essential that practical knowledge be applied in daily activities, in order to reach the targeted goal of making the beneficiaries computer literate, while enhancing the productivity base of these institutions of traditional governance. Finally three sets of VSAT equipment equipped with 2.4m dish, LNB, Bandwidth, Ku-Band, Direct Satellite technology were also purchased.

The idea behind the infrastructural support was that of pushing through a "revolution" of the traditional governance system in Ghana, placing information that millions of ordinary Ghanaians depended upon in the public domain. Furthermore, the use of a VSAT afforded those institutions without access to telephone lines to also tap into the system.

Regarding the installation of the ICTs infrastructure and equipment to establish the Traditional Governance and Information System (TGIS), a preliminary research activity of three months was carried out in order to design the Wide Area Network. It was followed by an intensive digitisation process across the regions to facilitate the smooth implementation of the central database, and on 25th. November 2003, a pilot scheme for preliminary connectivity utilising dial-up-Internet-connectivity was initiated within the National House of Chiefs, the ten Regional Houses of Chiefs including the Greater Accra Regional House of Chiefs, the Presidential Commission on Chieftaincy and the Chieftaincy Secretariat.

The National House of Chiefs was the first to be connected to the Internet. The equipment that was earlier provided to the House by the Chieftaincy Governance and Development Project funded by the Ford Foundation was in a deplorable state. After troubleshooting procedures had been performed, the system was therefore upgraded with the requisite software. The setting up of the network to Chieftaincy.org, via dial-up Internet involved replacement of some suitable electronic parts and supported by the Microsoft Windows XP operating system and compatible with the V.92 technology which is ideal for long-distance dial-up connections.

A presentation was made to the National House of Chiefs in the presence of 50 prominent traditional rulers from all the ten Regional Houses of Chiefs. It highlighted the project's commitment to the capacity-building of stakeholders and the preservation of materials bordering on indigenous knowledge and also on the Traditional Governance and Information System (TGIS) which included the project's unique e-mail system for traditional institutions and Chiefs.

Following the first installation, the project team visited all the ten Regional House of Chiefs to provide ICTs equipment, support the installation or repair materials, and configure local systems to connect to the Chieftaincy.org/TGIS via dial-up connection. They also solved technical problems or identified alternative solutions for connectivity. But of course, there were difficulties in connection due to the different resources available, technical problems and the capacity of the people in the various regions.

Shots of the road layout to some of the regions reached by the Project's staff

Vegetation along some of the routes to the project sites

After the first attempt to implement the Network using the dial-up connectivity, it was realised that the national communications setup was not efficient enough to accommodate the Internet connectivity that would ultimately lead to the creation of a WAN (Wide Area Network).

This was due to the fact that the telephone network within some of the regions was in a deplorable state and in some cases cables had suffered from wear and tear. Also, most of the regions had systematically connected one telephone line and extended it to cover up to five or more line extensions which in turn led to disruption of the dial–up connectivity. Some of the regional capitals closer to Accra were able to connect and utilise the service while in many other cases the connect time was too long and the strength of connection just too weak.

Technicians installing the VSAT

Another problem that was common to all the regions was the issue of financing huge telephone bills due to many hours of use of the Internet. This made the people responsible quite apprehensive.

Efforts were made to find solutions to these problems and concerns and for this reason, the possibility of using a VSAT solution was explored.

The proposed Wide Area Network (WAN) spanning all the 10 Regional Houses, the National House, Chieftaincy secretariat and the project office was intended to offer total data sharing amongst these institutions, serving as a communications backbone that was independent of the national grid and provided interoperability.

In order to achieve this flexible communications network and provide optimum performance amongst these institutions, whilst minimising the demand on the national communications grid, a VSAT–Broadband solution was chosen. This choice was based upon the advantages that it has over the national communications infrastructure and its practicality in worldwide application in the resonance of networking.

But, unfortunately, and especially at the time of the installation, VSAT technology, despite its numerous advantages and reliability, was not cheap. The project managed to locate a foreign IT company with representatives in Ghana, offering VSAT solutions at a relatively affordable price. However, it was possible to purchase only two VSAT pieces of equipment which have been installed in the Project Office (at the University of Ghana); and at the Chieftaincy Secretariat. The speed of connectivity through the basic bandwidth more than out-performed the dial-up connection previously used, but the objective of putting in place the Traditional Governance and Information System (TGIS) among all the traditional institutions was yet to be realised, since the other sites had not yet received their VSAT.

6.3. CONCLUSIONS

6.3.1. Impact on good governance and community development

According to the assessment of the project and the opinions expressed by the interviewees, the project was successful, especially in terms of raising awareness of the need to systematise the role and functions of traditional institutions vis-à-vis the modern governance system.

Of particular importance, in fact, was the dissemination and institutional building efforts provided that culminated in an enhancement of the awareness and capacity of the Chieftaincy institutions and their staff with regard to the potential and use of ICTs to manage their daily activities and, in particular, to preserve records and data. As a consequence of this, there is in fact, a growing demand for the active involvement of traditional leaders in Central government operations, due to the recognition of the importance of their role in supporting good governance at the local level. A clear example of this is the integration of the Chieftaincy institutions as partners within the "National Governance Programme of the Government". In particular, to state the importance of their opinion, and to promote and better manage the "partnership for development" in Ghana, the 7th. National Governance Workshop, held in Kumasi in October 2004, focussed on "Traditional Authority and Good Governance: implications for Democratic Consolidation". The workshop was organised by the government in collaboration with the National House of Chiefs under the sponsorship of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the technical input came from Prof. Irene K. Odotei, Project Manager of the "Governance, Culture and Development Project".

This shows how the project, and in general the activities undertaken by the University of Ghana, in particular the Institute of African Studies, were the "initiators" of a process that, although far from being completed, could lead to effective and sustainable development in the country.

In this process the role of ICTs is becoming ever more central. The importance of records of the Chieftaincy institutions is evident for a nation which could have avoided a considerable number of conflicts, associated with traditional governance disputes, if records had been kept properly for posterity. The digitisation and public availability of data will help to create a "memory heritage" from which information can be extracted and used as and when needed. Moreover, it will help to devise and standardise customary tradition and law.

In this sense, many projects, in collaboration with developmental partners, such as UNDP, UNECA, the World Bank, and others, have been initiated to assess the situation and the capacity at local level in order to support the government in better delivering services to the poor at local level, especially in connection with the revitalised process of decentralisation.

As indicated in a recent study of the World Bank Institute, in fact, there is a great confusion about the roles of key actors at local level. This confusion is made worse by the friction between the modern system of governance that the governments superimposed on the traditional institutions, where the weakness comes not from the absence of well defined roles, but from the limitations of the regulatory framework3. Therefore, there is an urgent need to make changes in current institutional arrangements so that community members and their traditional leaders can play a more active role in determining their communities' destiny, with the longer term goal of improving governance and local service delivery.

6.3.2. Challenges for integrating ICTs in traditional governance

First of all, the positive opinions and enthusiasm expressed by the participants on the need and the content of the training courses should be underlined. However, due to financial constraints and following the recommendation of the Chiefs, the project concentrated on the administrative staff of the National House of Chiefs, Chieftaincy Secretariat, the ten Regional Houses of Chiefs and selected Traditional Councils as an initial step. Despite the grant received from OSIWA, which enabled the project to initiate the process, funds are still required to accomplish the task of organising capacity–building workshops and seminars for Chiefs and their support staff in all the ten Regional Houses of Chiefs.

In this sense, it is also important to underline that the project aimed at establishing a sustainable process, where institutional and capacity-building was not only a sporadic activity done "on project", but was in a positive way "institutionalised" within the context of the academic research. For this reason, and also to solve some of the bureaucratic constraints that occurred due to the fact that the project was managed by the central administration of the University, and sometimes delaying the activities of the project, which should have been managed in a flexible way, it was decided to establish a "Centre on Governance, Culture and Development", as a not for profit organisation. This NGO was intended to serve as a scientific and consulting resource centre, to study and provide brokerage and research services on the issue of traditional governance at large.

At the same time, there was the need for specialist skills in ICTs and networking, and those skills were still limited and weak in the academic arena in Ghana. This led to the decision to establish another focussed not-for profit organisation, namely the "Culture, Education and Technology Network-CETNET". It was intended to provide specific services on ICTs and to serve as a complementary player in the modernisation of traditional governance in Ghana and in the continent of Africa.

With regard, more specifically, to ICTs, Ghana has embarked on an ambitious programme in response to the wave of technological transformations that are pervading the world, but due to the still weak infrastructure and the limited resources, it was necessary to focus on alternative affordable solutions and joint efforts to fully grasp the potential of ICTs for local development.

In this respect, the project intended to explore how to best make Internet facilities accessible to the Chieftaincy institutions to avoid them lagging behind in the development process, and so they could contribute to it. The choice made by the project team to utilise VSAT technology was definitely an important and challenging decision. Moreover, the acquisition of VSAT was initially hampered by bureaucratic "bottlenecks" within the National Communications Authority of Ghana (NCA) which regulates the communications infrastructure. It was important for the project team to consult the NCA due to new regulations requiring that importation into the country of VSAT equipment must satisfy its guidelines and those of the National Frequency Board. After consultations with some leading IT companies in the country, the project team became to the conclusion that it would be most beneficial and cost effective to acquire a dedicated VSAT instead of soliciting the services of these companies.

Due to financial constraints in the purchase of bandwidth and equipment, however, the project outlined a plan of setting up the WAN in phases. It carefully selected the various groups of users, and fitted them into different phases of the project according to current capacity, location and self-sustainability. Unfortunately, it must be said that, at the time of the mission, neither of the two VSAT systems are currently working due to technical difficulties and the high financial cost of operation.

6.3.3. Lessons Learned

One of the objectives achieved by the project was that of raising awareness on the importance of traditional culture and the economic value of information, and the possibilities of using ICTs to support the process of knowledge management, thus improving governance and generating local economic development.

In particular, a specific content of the training dealt with Intellectual Property Rights Protection.

This is important because, in addition to supporting administrative procedure and management of traditional governance systems, the enhanced opportunity for research, publications, codification, and dissemination of information using ICTs and multimedia, (such as production of documentaries for instance) also affords a unique opportunity to re-examine the rich cultural heritage of Ghana from a modern perspective, using ICTs.

It is evident that traditional leaders must acquaint themselves with modern practices of public sector administration and management while building on the traditions and values that command the trust and respect of members of their communities.

This effort is definitely taking place in the context of the government's desire to decentralise power and responsibilities to the communities, and to do so without taking undue risks. For this reason, it is generally believed that "pilot" experiences should provide the proper arena for testing new institutional or organisational arrangements on a reduced scale before lessons can be learned for nationwide application.

The Governance Culture and Development Project, funded by OSIWA has indeed taken a phenomenal step in the modernisation of Traditional Governance Institutions through the use of ICTs. As previously mentioned, other projects and initiatives have begun following this process, and moreover, the interest for the potential of harnessing good governance through reinforcing traditional authority institutions is not limited anymore to few areas and countries. Undoubtedly initiated in Ghana, it is now being recognised in many other African countries, from Cameroon to South Africa, etc.

It is the case that the Kings from different countries are becoming the ambassadors of this renewal of local traditional culture, being invited to meetings in the headquarters of the United Nations or the World Bank, and participating in, for instance, the "Fourth African Development Forum on: Governance for Progressing Africa4.

With specific regard to the ICTs component of the project, it is clear that the project, especially due to its limited financial budget, was not intended to fully realise the ICTs infrastructure of the Chieftaincy institutions in Ghana. Nevertheless, in addition to equipping some key authorities, the research and exploration of the project highlighted the advantages of VSAT technology. This potential is now increased due to the substantial lowering of prices which has come about as a result of increased experimentation and usage. The reliability is also improving and thus it is possible to say that the technological choice may suggest future positive trends that, if pursued, could lead to the completion of the WAN (Wide Area Network) and this, when completed, should lead to the Traditional Governance Information System (TGIS) in Ghana.

Clearly then, ICTs would provide the critical tools for launching traditional governance into the information age and all the advantages that it offers for development and good governance.

6.3.4. The way forward: towards an e-Traditional governance Network

Considering the fact that the identity of the people of Ghana is rooted in their cultural heritage, as expressed by all the people interviewed and by the Project Management, traditional governance would find a niche in the general governance structure of the people of Africa. Therefore, this project is not only a project, but a unique attempt to build the capacity of traditional institutions to usher them into the global system of mainstream governance to achieve this objective it is a question of cultural revolution, building on partnerships with NGOs and other institutions who have expertise and similar objectives.

With regard to the specific project initiated under the grant of OSIWA, out of 165 Traditional Councils, the project managed to train one official each from 25 traditional councils. There are therefore still 140 to be trained. Furthermore, two members each have been trained from the 10 Regional Houses of Chiefs, The National House of Chiefs and 3 Institutions related to traditional governance. In effect, only 56-persons so far have been adequately trained.

But, based on the experience gained and the appeal from beneficiaries of the workshops, the University of Ghana, in particular the "Centre of Governance, Culture and Development", in collaboration with the "Culture, Education and Technology Network – CETNET" aims at ensuring that at least one person in all the 165 Traditional Councils would be e-literate in the coming year. Of course this is also a matter of funding, but at the same time it is an issue of correct utilisation of pilot experiences and scale-up of practices.

In this regard, considering that the proliferation of telecommunications centres and cyber cafes, that providing computer and Internet facilities have resulted in the provision of public access to those who do not have access to private ownership due to infrastructural and financial constraints, there is an even more urgent need to acquire basic ICTs skills in order to be part of the long path to follow before Ghana can become a true information and knowledge society.

Joint efforts are needed building on what is already in place.

Therefore, the challenge for Ghana is to find a way to rely on the institutional arrangements for leadership and collective action with which communities feel most comfortable, while adopting universally accepted concepts of good governance. In this "research", the task of the different institutions is to be able to tailor ICTs to support the delicate balance between the past and the future.

Within this framework it is necessary, as part of the overall efforts of integrating tradition and posterity, to blend indigenous and modern forms of governance and to document (in both text and video) salient and positive elements of traditional culture. These will be used as inputs for codifying acknowledged positive patterns of values, ideas, principles and behaviour into written standard rules and practices for constitutional and legislative reforms. They will also serve to prepare policy guidelines for regulating roles, responsibilities, rights and obligations.

In all this, a particular emphasis should be given to the establishment of a network of community e-Traditional Centres where public communications facilities are provided, information is processed and knowledge is produced and made available to the community.

This e-Traditional Network should be done through linking the various initiatives, ongoing or planned, such as the Community Information Centres (CICs); the Community Knowledge Centres (CKCs); or the Village Information and Communication Infrastructure (VICI) and using the traditional leaders and Chieftaincy institutions as promoter and catalyst for innovation and local community development.

Notes

1. World Bank Institute, Delivering Services to the Poor: an assessment of the capacity to deliver Education, Health and Water Services to Local Communities in Ghana, working paper draft for discussion, February 2005.

2. For instance the "History and Development Project", funded by NUFU-Norwegian Cooperation.

3. See for example. "Odwira 2000: 25 years of Sustained Development", Informative brochure, by the Oyeeman Wereko Ampem II, Akuapem Gyasehene and Ohene of Amanokrom

4. Addis Ababa, 11th.-15th. October, 2004, organised by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).

References

African Training and Research Centre in Administration for Development (CAFRAD), Proceedings and Final report of the CAFRAD, Regional Workshop on e-governance, organized in partnership with ACBF, NEPAD, UNDESA and hosted by the Government of Ghana, Office of the Head of Civil Service, Accra, Ghana, 22-25th. November 2004;

Baku, Kofi, (edited by) "Chieftaincy in Africa: Culture, Governance and Development", Summary of International Conference Proceedings, January 6-10th., 2003, Accra, Ghana;

Odotei K, Irene, Prof., "ICTs in support of Traditional Governance: Chieftaincy and Governance in Ghana", in "Africa Networking: Development Information, ICTs and Governance", United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, 2004;

Odotei K, Irene, Prof., "Technical Report preparatory to the 7th National Governance Workshop on "Traditional Authority and Good Governance: implications for democratic consolidation", Kumasi, Ghana, 27-29th. October 2004;

Oyeeman Wereko Ampem II, Akuapem Gyasehene and Ohene of Amanokrom, "Odwira 2000: 25 years of Sustained Development", Report and brochures, Amanokrom, 2000;

Republic of Ghana, "Constitution of the Republic of Ghana", 1992;

Republic of Ghana, Office of the President of the Republic, National Governance Programme, "Traditional Authority and Good Governance: implications for democratic consolidation", Report of the 7th. National Governance Workshop, Kumasi, Ghana, 27-29th. October 2004;

Republic of Ghana, "The Ghana ICTs for Accelerated Development (ICT4AD) Policy, 2003;

Republic of Ghana, "An integrated ICTs-led Socio-economic Development Policy and Plan Development Framework for Ghana", 2002;

Republic of Ghana, "Vision 2020: Socio-Economic Development Framework", 2002;

Republic of Ghana, "Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy (GPRS): 2002-2004", 2001;

Republic of Ghana, "Coordinated Programme for Economic and Social Development of Ghana (2003-2012)", 2002;

Republic of Ghana, Ministry of Communications "Community Information Centres (CIC's) in the Age of Information and Communication Technology (ICTs): Ghana's Blueprint for Action", 2004;

Republic of Ghana, Ministry of Communications "Introducing the new Community Information Centres (CIC) in Ghana", 2005;

Republic of Ghana, Ministry of Communications "Draft Paper on ICTs Actions and Development", 2004;

Republic of Ghana, Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, Decentralisation Secretariat "National Decentralisation Action Plan (NDAP): Towards a Sector-wide approach for decentralisation implementation in Ghana (2003-2005)", September 2004;

University of Ghana, Legon, Institute of African Studies, Working Papers of the Project on "Chieftaincy, Governance and Culture", not published, 2000-2003;

University of Ghana, Legon, Centre on Governance, Culture and Development, Working Papers of the Project on "Governance Culture and Development", not published, 2003-2004;

University of Ghana, Legon, Centre on Governance, Culture and Development, Final Report of the OSIWA funded Project on "Governance Culture and Development", 2004;

University of Ghana, Legon, Ford Foundation, "Perceptions on Chieftaincy in Ghana", Research Report, 2000;

World Bank Institute, "Local Governance Capacity Development", Concept Note, 2004;

World Bank Institute, Delivering Services to the Poor: an assessment of the capacity to deliver Education, Health and Water Services to Local Communities in Ghana, working paper, 2005.

7
DISTRICT ADMINISTRATIVE NETWORK (DISTRICTNET) IN UGANDA

7.1. CONTEXT AND POLICY

7.1.1. The governance system and the main reforms in Uganda

Uganda, a former British colony, is a sovereign state and a republic. In January 1986, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni became the President of the Republic of Uganda after leading a successful five year liberation struggle. He then introduced the Movement System of governance, which theoretically, was a broad-based, inclusive and non-partisan political system (Art 70, 1995 Constitution). In implementing the Movement System, political party activities were suspended, except for operating party offices in the capital city, Kampala.

In July 2005 however, the people of Uganda voted in a referendum to adopt a multi-party political system. The Parliament of Uganda discussed and promulgated a new constitution in July 2005 as a basis for subsequent legal reforms. The new constitution is in the process of being ratified by District Councils as required by law.

The Government of Uganda is comprised of the Executive (headed by the President and assisted by the Vice President, Prime Minister and Cabinet Ministers), Parliament (headed by the Speaker) and the Judiciary (headed by the Chief Justice). Article 176 of the 1995 Constitution further provides that the system of local government in Uganda should be based on the district as a unit under which there should be lower local governments and administrative units. A decentralisation system applies to all levels of local government.

The Public Service Reform in Uganda has been going on since the early 1990s. It is spearheaded by the Ministry of Public Service.

Key areas of reform include:

i. Restructuring and downsizing.

ii. Introduction of Result Oriented Management (ROM) methodologies, to improve performance in government ministries and departments.

iii. Promoting efficiency and cost reduction in government services by introducing e-government systems, including integrated payroll and pension systems.

iv. The design and implementation of public sector pension reform and the introduction of a self-financing contributory system for future pension obligations, intended to control the growth of pension commitments.

At the same time, the Law Reform Commission is completely reviewing the legal system in Uganda to bring it into compliance with the 1995 Constitution (and now with the Uganda Constitution 2005). Some laws are obsolete and create red tape, while others are discriminatory towards the poor. Women's access to justice, in particular, is hindered by discriminatory laws such as land legislation, where inequities in land ownership were not corrected by the Land Act. The Constitutional Court has been instrumental in amending offending legislation including the abolition of corporal punishment and abolishing the inequality of access to divorce between male and female petitioners. Many reforms in the Justice, Law and Order Sector (JLOS) comprising of the Judiciary, Police, Prisons, and Directorate of Public Prosecutions are also under implementation.

7.1.2. The Poverty Eradication Action Plan and economic development

The Government of Uganda has formulated a number of programmes to address the key areas of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Government interventions to this effect included the formulation and implementation of the Uganda Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP), which included elements such as Universal Primary Education (UPE), and the Plan for Modernisation of Agriculture (PMA), Vision 2025 (being revised) and Medium-Term Competitive Strategy for the Private Sector (2000-2005), to mention but a few. The President of Uganda launched the Presidential Investors Roundtable (PIRT), a top-level Business Advisory Council, on 30th. September 2004. This Council has five working groups: Agribusiness, ICTs, Education, Infrastructure and Regulatory Environment. The mandate of the Council is to advise the Government on the steps that should be taken to improve the investment climate and increase Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows to Uganda.

According to the PEAP, which was prepared through a consultative process involving the Central and Local Government, Parliament, Donors and Civil Society, Uganda's overall strategy and goal is aimed at improving the welfare of all Ugandans and the eradication of poverty. It is believed that under this plan Uganda will be transformed into a modern economy where all sectors will actively participate in economic growth.

The PEAP is grouped under five 'pillars': (1) Economic management, (2) Production, competitiveness and incomes (3) Security, conflict-resolution and disaster-management (4) Good governance and (5) Human development. The four core challenges for PEAP implementation are (a) the restoration of security, dealing with the consequences of conflict and improving regional equity (b) restoring sustainable growth in the incomes of the poor (c) human development (d) using public resources transparently and efficiently to eradicate poverty.

With regard to human development, the PEAP document reported that recent years have seen major improvements in the following areas:

i. Education and literacy, through the introduction of Universal Primary Education and functional adult literacy programmes;

ii. HIV/AIDS prevalence rates stagnated between 6% and 7%;

iii. Child nutrition, together with infant and maternal mortality; health reforms and the construction of health centres in rural areas;

v. Improved access to public services through decentralisation;

vi. Infant and Maternal Mortality strategy to address child and maternal health. The key interventions in this strategy are: Improving the quality of health care and the treatment of malaria, sanitation, community mobilisation, and family planning;

vii. Improved access to water supply.

The expansion of production and incomes in rural areas is addressed by a large number of interventions, which are grouped under the Plan for the Modernisation of Agriculture (PAM). This plan focusses on agricultural modernisation and commercialisation by a multi-sectoral approach to addressing the constraints facing agriculture-based livelihoods. In September 2001, the government launched the Strategic Exports Programme (SEP) aimed at increasing competitiveness by stimulating value added investments in selected sectors of the economy and removing bottlenecks that hindered the private sector's ability to take advantage of emerging trade opportunities under various initiatives including African Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA) of USA and Everything But Arms (EBA).

7.1.3. Local Governance Policy and strategy

Decentralisation in Uganda has been implemented for over 12 years now, guided by the Local Government Statute of 1993, the 1995 Constitution and the 1997 Local Government Act. This was based on the conviction that decentralisation comprehensively facilitates the realisation of development and political objectives for Uganda through democratisation, equitable distribution of resources between and within districts and improvements in public sector performance. Democratic participation advocates popular participation, empowerment of local residents and regular local elections. Decentralisation is intended to improve transparency and accountability in local governments and promote good governance and participatory democracy.

The system of local government in Uganda is based on the District as a Unit under which there are lower local governments, the Administrative Unit Councils. Elected Local Government Councils which are accountable to the people are made up of persons directly elected to represent electoral areas, with special seats for persons with disabilities, youth and women councillors. There is a legal requirement that 30% of the Parliament and Local Councils should be comprised of women representatives in addition to provision for representatives of young people and people with disabilities.

The Local Government Council is the highest political authority in its area of jurisdiction. The councils are corporate bodies having both legislative and executive powers. They have powers to make local laws and enforce implementation. On the other hand Administrative Unit Councils serve as political units to advise on planning and implementation of services. They assist in the resolution of disputes, monitor the delivery of services and assist in the maintenance of law, order and security.

There are five tiers of local government in Uganda. Most executive decisions are taken at the Local Council 5 (district LC5) or Local Council 3 (sub-county LC3) level, although the Local Council 1 (village LC1) level has important responsibilities, for instance, in administering the Local Council courts.

Local governments are empowered to make and approve their own budgets and development plans. They raise their own revenue from a range of local taxes and allocate expenditure on decentralised and transferred services. They also recruit and manage personnel and make bylaws. Local governments receive financial support from central government in order to supplement their recurrent and development budgets. In this regard, they receive three types of grants namely, unconditional, conditional and equalisation grants. This financing arrangement is stipulated in the Constitution and the Local Governments Act.

Bilateral and multilateral donors have also continued to support local governments, through the Ministries of Finance, Planning and Economic Development and Local Government, in order to deepen the process of decentralisation and socio-economic transformation. The donors include the World Bank, African Development Bank, European Union, DFID, DANIDA, USAID, Irish Aid and the Dutch Government to mention but a few. Without this support, decentralisation would have taken longer to take root.

Some reported progress in improving service delivery under decentralisation are as follows:

i. Decentralised primary school classroom construction has demonstrated substantially reduced unit costs and faster construction rates than previous centralised programmes.

ii. The economic evaluation of the Local Government Development Programme (LGDP) quotes research by UNCDF, DANIDA and others showing Social Returns on Investment (SRI) for investments by local governments ranging from 12% upwards and which compares well with returns on central government investment.

In the further implementation of decentralisation, the government's objective was to increase local autonomy while strengthening upwards and downwards accountability, so that the autonomy is used to meet the needs of the population. Other issues being addressed are the restructuring of local governments to make them cost effective and efficient, computerisation, establishment of standards for service delivery, improving urban planning capacities, financial management, gender mainstreaming and legal reform. This would include the revision of laws such as the Country and Planning Act (1964), the Public Health Act, the Trading Licensing Act, and the Markets Act which need to be revised to make them consistent with the Constitution and the LG Act (1994). A review is also needed of the legislation which governs poverty reduction activities such as the Local Government Act 1997, LG Financial and Accounting Regulations 1998, the Internal Audit manual, the Town and Country planning Act 1964, the LG Rating Decree 1979, the Trading Licensing Act 1964 and the Markets Act 1942, to bring them in line with the changing environment.

7.1.4. ICTS STATUS, POLICY AND REGULATORY FRAMEWORK

The government of the Republic of Uganda recognised the important role information and ICTs play in national development. To this end, the Uganda ICTs Policy framework was finalised in 2002 and adopted by Cabinet in 2003. Its vision is "a Uganda are national development, especially human development and good governance, are sustainably enhanced, promoted and accelerated by efficient application and use of ICTs including timely access to information".

The main policy objectives were:

— To sensitise and create awareness among the general public and all stakeholders about the role of information and ICTs in Uganda's development process.

— To increase the level of ICTs functional literacy and build human resource capacity.

— To promote and enable the building and establishment of an appropriate infrastructure that supports ICTs development and at the same time meets universal ICTs access goals.

— To promote fair competition and private investment in the ICTs sector with particular emphasis on development and encouragement of local participation including specific incentives for investing in ICTs.

— To identify and establish innovative financing mechanisms that address the specific needs of ICTs development.

— To promote the use of ICTs in the stimulation of production, storage, and dissemination of in-country information and knowledge in both the public and private sector.

— To facilitate the broadest possible access to public domain information, especially development information.

— To promote a conducive environment for media pluralism that will enhance cultural identity and national sovereignty.

— To promote multilingualism and other efforts to provide access to information by the disadvantaged groups and communities.

— To ensure gender mainstreaming in ICTs development.

— To provide for the establishment of an enabling and desirable, legal and regulatory framework that among other things takes into account the convergence of technologies.

— To encourage and support Research and Development in ICTs.

— To accord due regard, recognition and protection of intellectual assets.

— To enhance collaboration and co-ordination in ICTs development at the local, regional and international level.

The ICTs Policy has led to several ICTs initiatives and investments in the country. Each sector, including local governments, is required to develop ICTs implementation strategies in conformity with the National ICTs Policy.

Further, an e-Readiness Assessment Study was conducted in 2003, to pave the way for the promotion of e-government in the country. Currently, the e-government Strategy Framework is being finalised in 2005. Its main objectives are:

1. To continuously improve the efficiency of, and access to, government information and services.

2. To use the successful development of the e-government initiative to promote Uganda as an Information Technology centre in Africa.

3. To address privacy and security issues related to e-government implementation.

4. To ensure sufficient revenue streams and funding that enable the development of core e-government competencies.

5. To establish leadership and partnerships that advance e-government services.

6. To develop and maintain a seamless and comprehensive e-government interface.

7. To manage the cost of e-government implementation through effective use of technology.

8. To institutionalise the use of e-government information and services through the adoption of appropriate organisational models.

The Uganda Communications Act, 1997 (Cap 106 Laws of Uganda) established the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), and the rights and duties of the state, enterprises, institutions, organisations and individuals in the use and management of the means of communication, in the establishment and management of communications networks, in the rendering of communications services as well as the general responsibilities if there is violation of the law. Regulations made so far under the Act include the Communications (Establishment and Management of the Rural Communications Development Fund) Regulations of 2002; and the Uganda Communications (Enforcement Procedures) Regulations of 2004.

Other ICTs related legislations in place include:

1. The Press and Journalist Statute 1995 (Cap 105), The Statute extended Article 29(1) (Freedom of expression) of the Constitution to the print media. It also created the Media Council, the National Institute of Journalists of Uganda and a Disciplinary Committee within the Media Council. The Council is responsible for regulating eligibility for media ownership and requires journalists to register with the National Institute of Journalists of Uganda.

2. The Electronic Media Statute, Cap 104, Laws of Uganda provides for the establishment of the Broadcasting Council that licenses radio, television and video rental licences. The purchase, use and sale of television sets is also subject to licensing by the Council.

3. The Access to Information Act, 2004, that makes provision for access by individuals and/or corporations to information of interest relating to a public company.

Proposed legislation due for consideration include:

1. National Information Technology Authority—Uganda (NITAU) Bill. The proposed Act establishes an Authority as a co-ordinating, monitoring and supervisory body to promote National IT development in support of the principles of modernisation within the context of poverty eradication; to provide a national IT-policy framework and technical support for IT related services for government-wide use; and for other matters incidental to these.

2. The Electronic Transactions Bill, 2003 proposed an Act to provide for the use, security, facilitation and regulation of electronic communications and transactions and to encourage the use of e-government services. It intended to inter alia promote e-government and e-commerce in Uganda.

3. The Electronic Signatures Bill, 2003 proposed an Act to make provision for and to regulate the use of electronic signatures. It attempts to do this through provisions relating to the establishment of the Public Key Infrastructure for authenticity and security of documents.

4. The Computer Misuse Bill, 2003 proposed an Act to make provision for the safety and security of electronic transactions and information systems; to prevent unlawful access, abuse or misuse of information systems, including computers, and to make provision for securing the conduct of electronic transactions in a trustworthy electronic environment.

The ICTs needs for Uganda are identified in the National ICTs Policy (2002), and the Uganda e-government Strategy Framework The Uganda e-Readiness Assessment Study revealed the following as the main ICTs needs in the country:

i. Conducting a study at every central and local government office to identify information system needs.

ii. Development of ICTs infrastructure.

iii. Need to reduce connectivity costs and promote universal access.

iv. Equipping every desk with a PC and every government office with email, and office productivity and collaboration software.

v. Setting up a metropolitan network to connect government offices, with gateways to connect to the Internet and the telephone networks. This network should link central and local governments.

vi. Setting up pilot e-government kiosks (starting with existing telecentres) to test the newly developed content and e-delivery mechanisms as well as the economic and technical sustainability of the proposed kiosks.

vii. Setting up the ICTs co-ordinating agency for the government.

viii. Setting up a payment gateway and public key infrastructure to enable online transactions.

ix. Development and standardising ICTs education and training.

x. Setting up an ICTs incubator for encouraging investments in the sector.

xi. General sensitisation on the benefits of ICTs and e-government to public servants, citizens, business, civil society and other groups.

xii. Legal and regulatory framework to promote and safeguard ICTs.

xiii. Promotion of ICTs in schools.

xiv. Development of local content.

xv. Addressing problems of multilingualism.

xvi. Development of a sustainable and affordable alternative power supply to electricity, especially in rural areas to address the limitations of the electricity grid.

xvii. Financing of ICTs development activities.

To address some of the problems mentioned above, the Uganda Telecommunications Sector Policy (2005) proposed to undertake the following specific initiatives by 2010:

i. To ensure the ubiquitous presence of telecommunications infrastructure and services that will enable sustainable human development through the ease and affordability of access to relevant, accurate, and timely information (actual content being the responsibility of the various public sectors as well as civil society and private sector initiatives).

ii. To facilitate the delivery of the high level information and service needs to all sectors of society, especially the marginalised sections of society that comprise rural or poor communities, women and people with disabilities, through close integration with the following: IT sector, Broadcasting sector, Media sector, and Postal sector.

iii. To promote the growth of the production and service sectors related to or closely supported by the telecommunications industry in Uganda (research and development, fabrication and manufacturing, training, consultancy, outsourcing services, etc).

iv. To ensure that all aspects of processes and operations in the sector take full account of the following cross-cutting issues: Gender concerns, the physically disadvantaged and sustainable exploitation of the environment.

Although there has not been a comprehensive survey of human resources in ICTs in Uganda, it is fairly obvious that the need for some ICTs skills exceed the current supply. Various levels of skills are required and the existing training institutions are meeting some of the training needs.

There is need to assess the national requirement for ICTs skills, establish how much of this is available, and then determine the best strategy of meeting the appropriate ICTs skills demand. However the ICTs skills that will be needed, and therefore the kind of training that will be required, depend very much on the ICTs policy adopted by Uganda as a nation, and by the Government in particular. For example if government should adopt a policy of information sharing using modern ICTs, Local Area Networks (LAN) and Wide Area Networks (WAN) will be introduced in government Ministries, Departments and Agencies. This would require government employees to acquire a range of ICTs skills that would otherwise not be required.

In order to ensure equitable geographic distribution of telecommunications services in the country, UCC developed and is implementing the Rural Communications Development Policy. Having identified the challenges to the achievement of the 1996 Policy targets, the following common challenges and interventions were adopted under Uganda's Rural Communications Development Programme:

1. Awareness and literacy – support a vanguard training institution in each district to create literacy and awareness about the potential of ICTs; support district websites to demonstrate some benefits and use through relevant content;

2. Access – support an internet PoP in each district; set up a national IXP; ensure the provision of a phone in each sub-county (the smallest local administrative unit in Uganda)

3. Affordability – give outright one off grants to small start-ups and partial one off grants to bigger rural operators; permit or require asymmetrical interconnection settlements in favour of rural telecoms operators.

A 1% levy on all telecoms service providers is the main funding driver for the Rural Communications Development Fund. Development partners have also come in to give additional support, including: International Development Research Centre (IDRC) which supported the policy and strategy research (Canadian $200,000); The World Bank which has given a grant of $5 million (under the Energy for Rural Transformation Project) towards actual implementation.

Through subsidies from the Fund to various companies, the following projects have so far been implemented:

(a) 20 internet PoPs were established in various districts.

(b) Establishment of 26 district websites (www.dip.go.ug)

(c) Establishment of 4 Internet cafes.

(d) Establishment of 3 ICTs training centres.

(e) Provision of 66 public payphones.

The following projects are in progress with most of them nearing completion in 2005:

(a) Establishment of 30 district websites.

(b) Provision of Internet cafes in 11 districts.

(c) Establishment of ICTs training centres in 45 districts.

(d) Provision of 200 public access points.

In April 2005, at the Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET/OWA) consultative meeting in Kampala, participants identified the following issues for Uganda with respect to the WSIS and the National ICTs policy:

i. Financing mechanisms: Rural Communications Development Fund (RCDF), National Budget from the Ministry of Finance & Economic Planning and Development, Development partners, Private sector, Financial institutions.

ii. A centralised ICTs co-ordinating agency should be established to collect funds in one centre. This centre should co-ordinate other matters relating to ICTs.

iii. On the issue of Internet governance, there should be a regulatory framework as cyber crime is becoming a concern in Uganda.

iv. Need for capacity building in both ICTs use and application

v. Need for sharing of experiences: both best practices and failures.

vi. Need to review the ICTs policy with a view to mainstreaming gender within the policy

vii. Need to put emphasis on mainstreaming ICTs in the agricultural sector

viii. Need to mobilise the involvement of communities in ICTs-related activities in their respective areas.

7.1.5. Vision 2035: Towards a Modern Industrialised and Knowledge Based Society

In March 2005, the ICTs/e-government Inter-Agency National Planning Team was established, under the co-ordination of the National Planning Authority. The main goal of this team was to discuss ways and means of ensuring that ICTs/e-government services were undertaken by the Government of Uganda as one of the core priority sub-sector in the execution of the proposed "National Vision 2035: Towards a Modern Industrialised and Knowledge Based Society".

To realise this vision, and consistent with the new policy reforms for the transformation of the Ugandan economy suggested by Hon. Dr. Ezra Suruma, Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, it was necessary to spearhead the process of ensuring that ICTs/e-government Sub-sectors are given due and quick attention under the National Development Planning Framework. As a result the Inter-Agency Team was set up and asked to involve informed members from various sectors (Government, Private, Civil Society and other stakeholders) in discussions in a participatory and transparent manner and to come up with realistic and acceptable National ICTs/e-government frameworks in the perspective of long and medium term Master Plans for implementation.

The Inter-Agency Team is chaired by the National Planning Authority (NPA) that also ensures the monitoring and evaluation of the overall process following the same participatory model. The team held its first two meetings on 24th. March, 2005 and 20th. May, 2005. During these meetings, the main challenges which faced the ICTs/e-government initiative implementation were outlined and discussed. These included:

• Inadequate funding for ICTs/e-government initiatives both in the national Recurrent and Development budgets, as well an inflexible and ineffective budgeting process;

• Inadequate ICTs/e-government basic infrastructure;

• Inadequate awareness of the benefits of ICTs/e-government in national development;

• Lack of co-ordination leading to duplication of efforts;

• Very minimal standardisation of ICTs infrastructure across institutions;

• Lack of integration and harmonisation of ICTs systems, initiatives and activities (leading to wastage of financial, material, human and other resources);

• Limited levels of e-Championship at the highest political and technical levels;

• Widening digital divide between rural and urban communities;

• Lack of enabling legal frameworks (e-transactions, Public Private Partnerships, etc.);

• Lack of a functional and effective Monitoring and Evaluation framework for ICTs/e-government initiatives;

• Limited operationalisation of the National ICTs policy;

• Inadequate practice of the participatory/all-inclusive national planning process;

• Lack of scientific, transparent and universally agreed upon national prioritisation Framework that would facilitate ranking of national development priorities for each planning and development period;

• Inadequate capacity (human, institutional, technological and financial resources).

Within this context, the Inter Agency Team recognised the importance of ICTs in national development, being central to the pursuit of productivity driven growth in all sectors of the economy, hence, having a cross-cutting impact, and stated the need to develop a long-term comprehensive national programme to promote ICTs awareness, confidence and utilisation in public and private sector institutions including those of communities.

The Inter Agency Team had the objective of co-ordinating activities intended to make the National e-government Strategy framework operational. This was prepared under the guidance of the Inter-Ministerial Committee, formed to spearhead the formulation and implementation of the National ICTs Policy 2003. The Committee is co-ordinated by the Uganda National Council of Science and Technology (UNCST) and its secretariat is at the Uganda Communication Commission (UCC). Other initiatives carried out by the Committee include the establishment of the e-government Task Force, under the chair of the Ministry of Works, Housing and Communications (MoWHC).

During the first two meetings of the Inter Agency Team, the need for involvement of all interested stakeholders, and the commitment at the highest political level was underlined. The participation of the Office of the President is a positive contribution to the possibility for increasing the minimal e-Championship of the Presidency so far.

The participants also called for a greater appreciation of ICTs in the country by integrating ICTs in the National Development Planning Framework. It was also resolved that the committee should take advantage of the ongoing national budgeting item in their medium term and annual plans and, on a long term basis, it was recommended that the government should be lobbied to designate a Ministry solely responsible for the ICTs sector regulation and development, in line with the recommendations from regional and international organisations.

In order to implement these decisions, participants called for a national round table meeting involving all stakeholder institutions to harmonise and rationalise ICTs sector development policies, plans and activities. This process would lead to the formulation of Vision 2035 and multi-annual, annual national and sectoral plans of action.

7.2. THE DISTRICTNET PROJECT

7.2.1. Background and Justification

Districts, counties, sub-counties and parishes have been empowered by the Uganda "Local Government Act 1997" to be self-governing. This means that planning and implementing projects, identifying revenue streams and managing revenue and human resources, budgeting and control are now done by local governments and not central government. In the local government structure, the district acts as a focal point to account for resources while lower councils act as centres for implementing district programmes.

The District Local Government (LC V) and the sub-county local governments (LC III) are the most important administrative units in the district local government, as per the Local Government Act 1997. At present there are 56 Districts with over 900 sub-counties in Uganda.

A lot of financial resources (from both donors and the government) are going into financing various projects at local councils level in various districts. The concern in all cases has been that money must be used for the purpose for which it was intended. The overall management of a local council now requires that the council make considerable investment in human resources and infrastructure to manage these increased responsibilities.

To discuss these issues, a Roundtable Workshop with the theme "ICTs for Rural Development" was held in March 2001, in Jinja, with participants from rural and upcountry institutions in the public and private sectors. Four pilot districts of Kayunga, Lira, Mbale and Mbarara were represented, including senior district officials. A number of ICTs projects were proposed and prioritised. One of the six projects selected was the District Administrative Network Programme (DistrictNet) at the district headquarters and lower local government and council level.

A project proposal was then finalised by the districts to support and complement the ongoing process of policy decentralisation and public participation.

The major problems identified during the workshop and which resulted in the DistrictNet project were:

• Lack of a convenient mode of communication between the district and the lower local governments, leading to poor follow-up and co-ordination of activities, which further resulted in delays and inaccuracies;

• Poor delivery of public services due to inefficient record keeping of a variety of paper based data and information, including council minutes and statistical data. This resulted in records being lost and those which were available were in a form that made it difficult to find and share information;

• Financial records were maintained and processed manually, and often not up-to-date and inaccurate leading to a lack of transparency and accountability;

• Public information on government programmes was lacking due to an absence of information in a publicly useable format, resulting in limited transparency and public participation.

To mitigate these problems DistrictNet was designed and implemented, as an attempt to support the overall objective of the decentralisation programme by providing the district and lower councils with tools and infrastructure to handle increased responsibilities and, at the same time, promoting transparency and improving the provision of public information.

DistrictNet is funded by the International Institute for Communication Development (IICD) in collaboration with the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom, the Ministry of Local Government and the beneficiary Districts.

The districts manage the project, with the support of the Ministry of Local Government, as pioneers for the benefit of a future possible national approach.

7.2.2. Strategy and Objectives

The project aim was to improve the performance of local governments by establishing functional data/information management and public communication systems for effective and efficient decentralised service delivery.

Based on the analysis of the administrative activities at the district/Sub-County headquarters and the findings on the infrastructure available then, DistrictNet was conceived to improve performance in a number of specific areas:

• To reduce administrative costs by providing a quick and direct means of communication between districts, lower councils and central government.

• To improve the overall efficiency of the district by introducing a common and shareable databank that could be used by all officials (the executive and civil servants) at the district and lower governments level.

• To provide interface/linkages with external parties and sources of information so that information is available to all key stakeholders.

• To train local government staff in basic ICTs skills and on the technical solutions being provided under the project.

• To improve on the accuracy of service delivery data; and

• To enhance transparency and accountability and strengthen the public information function in local governments.

7.2.3. Rationale and Structure

During the first year, the project was planned to be implemented in the four pilot district headquarters and 11 sub-counties. External donor funding was secured to finance the first/pilot year's investments and some of the operational costs. The districts and the Ministry of Local Government (MoLG) also contributed to some of the set up costs in the pilot year.

The four pilot districts were selected so that there would be one from each of the four 'regions' of Uganda. Additionally a 'new district' was required to have the experience of the unique challenges of such districts, hence the choice of Kayunga District. They contain a total of 112 sub-counties, distributed as follows:

• Kayunga District: 09 Sub-counties

• Lira District: 25 Sub-counties

• Mbale District: 31 Sub-counties

• Mbarara District: 47 Sub-counties

During and following the pilot year, it was expected that the benefits of the project would emerge, and useful lessons learned. The project also provided for a seminar to share experience, with other districts, but it was not within the scope of the project to roll out to all districts and sub-counties. However, it was planned that 11 more sub-counties were to be covered during the second year, and a further 21 sub-counties in the third year, in the four pilot districts only.

Moreover, considering that many government programmes and projects were already focussing on building the capacity of local governments to manage their affairs more efficiently and more transparently, the project proposed to set up a Steering Committee to, among other things, liaise with other districts and other Ministries to ensure rollout of the project to the remaining sub-counties and districts. In the pilot phase, the project plan was to:

• Introduce data and voice communication links between districts and lower local governments; and

• Introduce electronic data processing in financial management, data communication, data storage and analysis.

The technical solutions to be adopted involved:

• Installing a Local Area Network (LAN) with a file/email/internet server and at least 10 personal computers (PCs). In addition, installing one PC in each sub-county.

• Installing a data/voice communication link between district headquarters and the pilot sub-counties. The minimum requirement for data is access to an email service. A variety of technologies were proposed to be used, depending on the connectivity infrastructure present. Connectivity solutions included a fixed land line with a modem, mobile phone with data accessories, HF radio with data accessories, Broadband wireless radio with data and voice channels and VSAT terminals.

• Setting up a computerised data bank, vote books, work plans, financial accounting and report preparation; and

• Starting a training programme for users in basic ICTs skills, and use of computerised applications.

The districts were intended to fund investments and operational costs from their budget after the pilot year, including all sources of revenue for the districts, which include Internal (District) tax collections, budget support from central government and donor funding.

7.2.4. Organisation and Management Arrangements

The Project owners are the District Local Governments of the pilot districts.

The Chairman of Kayunga District Local Council, Eng. Stephen Dagada, had the responsibility of co-ordinating project implementation between districts for the first year, a role that was planned to rotate to other District Chairpersons annually. Actually, given the quality of the leadership of Eng. Dagada, he was reconfirmed as Co-ordinator of the project for the entire period of execution and for its future implementation.

DistrictNet's organisation was innovative within the public sector. In order to be successful, it required sufficient staff time with external support. It was fundamental that District Councils allowed for sufficient staff time. The project was planned to be implemented as a mainstreamed activity within each pilot district, and the District Executive was to oversee its implementation as part of its normal duties. A Project Implementation Team (PIT) of three persons was formed in each district, headed by the Chief Administrative Officer. The implementation team consisted of executives of the district council together with the civil servants of the pilot districts and sub-counties in the pilot districts. The PIT had to spend at least two person-days each per month on project implementation during the first year. A "Technical Manager/User Support Officer" was hired in each district on a fulltime basis in the first year to ensure adequate human resources to start the project. However, the Ministry of Local Government (MoLG) was involved in the implementation of the project as external "Technical

Figure 1. Eng Steven Dagada and Gianluca Misuraca at the Nile River after visiting the Project's site in the Kayunga District.

Advisor", and providing facilitators and materials for awareness seminars and ICTs skills training.

The financial plan has been drawn up showing investments, expenses and revenues over a five-year period. The project started with ICTs installations in a limited number of sub-counties, to be expanded later. Investments were to be made in the four districts' headquarters and 11 sub-counties in the first year, with an additional 11 sub-counties in the second year and completion in the third year. Development of information management and sharing mechanisms was planned to take place in the first year, with more district officers benefitting from the results as the project progressed. The total budget is shown below. It includes both the financial contribution of the donor agency (DFID through IICD) and the Ministry of Local Government and Districts.

DistrictNet's Project – Budget:

Source: IICD, DistrictNet (Pilot Phase), Finance Account, 2004.

The external funding was originally ensured for eighteen months, but a second refinancing by IICD was decided in 2005.

An important role in the project was played by the Chief Administrative Officer of each of the pilot districts, this functioned as the Technical Project Planning Group.

One of the main challenges arising from this