A paper written by Abdelsalam, Reddick and El Kadi highlights the success and failures of e-government projects in Egypt.
Egypt is reported to be one of the oldest nations in the world. The country developed around the waters of River Nile.
Egypt is divided into 29 administrative units called governorates just as Kenya is divided into 47 counties. The Egyptian governorates are further divided into cities and districts.
The e-government program in Egypt was established in 2001. This was called as the Egyptian Information Society Initiative (EISI). The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT) was put in charge of the e-government program.
In 2004, the MCIT was renamed as Ministry of State for Administrative Development and Dr. Ahmed Darwish was appointed as the minister in charge of the Ministry. He was formerly in charge of e-government as a Director.
Service delivery was automated in the municipalities through the introduction of e-government program. The government established what was then called smart “citizen-service-center.”
Web portals were developed for all governorates as well as putting in place Citizen Relationship Management (CRM) information systems.
These researchers focused their analysis on three governorates. That is Matrouh, South Sinai and Port Said.
Matrouh is made of large swaths of dessert land which stretches 450 kilometers along the Mediterranean Sea. As a result of its climatic conditions, the governorate has limited economic activities mainly in olive cultivation, tourism and handicraft activities. Tourism is the largest activity in that section of Egypt.
South Sinai on the other hand has a lot of tourism activities with historic sites such as St. Catherine’s Monastery. Investors are attracted to this region where they have built the largest number of hotels.
Port Said on the other hand is urban in nature and it is the home of Port Said city. The city is located at the entry point of Suez Canal. There are many economic activities in this governorate such as trade, maritime services, tourism and commerce.
- E-government is promising in most African countries according to surveys conducted by the United Nations;
- Countries in North Africa are performing quite well in this arena compared to the rest of Africa;
- The top countries in Africa according to UN are: Egypt, Tunisia and Mauritius;
- The World Bank Group (WBG) has noted that the use of ICT can help transform Africa economically;
- There is a lot of excitement on the capacity of e-government implementation to transform service delivery in Africa;
- Africa has been slow in implementing e-government when compared to other Western Africa countries.
- Africa’s private sector is far ahead of the public sector when it comes to success rates in adoption of ICT;
- According to researchers, bureaucratic inertia is one of the leading reasons why e-government projects fail;
- Huge ICT projects in terms of scope and scale, the more they are likely to fail;
- Lack of skilled human resources, poor infrastructure and inadequate financial resources are other additional reasons why e-government projects fail in Africa;
