Cultivating trust - an electronic-government development model for addressing the needs of developing countries

Evaluating existing initiatives for developing electronic government (e-government) in addition to identifying main challenges can provide valuable learning points in contributing towards efficient and effective implementation of e-government projects. The digital divide, issues of cyber security, privacy and primarily trust have been identified as the main challenges for implementing e-government in developing countries. This paper presents a proposed multi-stage model for implementing e-government in developing countries and identifies different dimensions of the challenges which surface in early stages. The issue of building trust while defying the obstacle of the digital divide through the proposed staged implementation is addressed in detail.