E-government in Kenya: a conceptual framework to increase public participation

Abstract

The Kenya government has been making significant attempts to make its services and information on the Internet available in the recent past. The success of these efforts depends to a great extent, on how well the targeted users i.e. the citizens in general make use of the services and information. A UN E-Government survey conducted in 2008 indicates that Kenya ranks very low on citizen usage of E-Government with an index of 0.04 ranking position 146 out of the 189 countries surveyed globally. The purpose of this research was to develop a framework for increasing public participation of E-Government services in Kenya. Towards achieving this goal, the research set to investigate the factors that influence E-Government adoption and to explore on what needs to be done to improve adoption. The research was conducted in two stages. Using an extension of the technology acceptance model, a survey was conducted to find out the factors influencing EGovernment services in Kenya. The proposed research model was validated using data collected using 700 questionnaires distributed to commercial cybercafes in seven towns across the Country. 523 valid responses were received. The results of this survey were used to propose a framework for increasing public participation. The framework was validated using data collected from 89 Internet users. The findings of this study have various implications for research as well as practice. For research the factors that influence E-Government usage were discussed. For practice, the findings of this study provide a generic framework for implementation of E-Government frameworks. Its finding can be used by government in developing countries as a guide when developing E-Government services. The major limitation to this study was the inability to include non - cybercafe users in our study. This could have introduced a bias in the findings.