E-Governance in the Developing World in Action

E-Governance is a powerful tool to bring about change to the government processes in the developing world. E-governance operates at the cross roads between Information and Communication Technology and government processes and is divided in three overlapping domains: e-administration, e-services and e-society. In order to be successful, e-governance needs to be firmly embedded in the existing government processes, needs to be politically and technically supported by the governments and provide users reasons to go and stay on-line. In order to maximize the impact, process change needs to be considered part and parcel of e-governance. In this report we present and evaluate an e-governance programme in Uganda - East Africa. The programme, DistrictNet, tries to provide transparency at a local government level and improve the provision of public information through the implementation of ICT. DistrictNet started in 2002 and is on-going. The achievements of the programme are presented and evaluated against three domains of e-governance and the impact on the government processes. On the basis of the evaluation we elicit lessons learned to guide similar programmes at the local government levels in the developing world.