icegov2012 proceedings

Asia, which is home to around three-fifths of the world citizens,
has only around 70 per cent of the level of e-government in
Europe while the level of services in Africa barely squares off at
40 per cent of those in Europe. Within any region, countries at the
lower percentile of e-development do not fare well either. This is
especially true of the lower income countries in both Asia and
Africa. The 10 least e-ready countries in Asia have barely 37 per
cent of the level of e-government in Europe while in Africa the
figure is little more than 20 per cent [6]. Figure 1 below shows
global trends over the last decade in regional progress towards egovernment.
Figure 1: Advances in regional e-government development
(Source: UN E-Government Survey, 2012)
However, this scenario is not entirely hopeless. Within the last
decade in particular, many developing countries especially in
Africa and Asia, have increased their web presence, clearly
utilizing the opportunity to leapfrog the development cycle
through innovative adoption and deployment of ICTs. In Eastern
Africa, for example, mobile money transfer has taken strong roots
in Kenya and Uganda, and rapidly spreading across the continent
[1]. The effects of these technologies on socio-economic
development, gender empowerment, increased schooling rates and
rising income levels have been the subject of many recent
economic literature.
In view of the important role that ICTs play in bridging the digital
divide between countries and regions of the world, can the
deployment of ICTs also bridge the digital divide within countries
to the same extent thereby reducing economic disparities within
the country? This paper addresses this question by examining the
case of Nigeria, a West African nation, which aspires to become a
top 20 economy by 2020. The telecommunications industry
remains the fastest-growing sector in the country, recording
34.38% growth in 2010 and 34.76% in 2011, rapidly transforming
the business, economic and governance landscape across the
country. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: in section
2, a brief review of the methodology employed is presented, while
section 3 discusses the country experiences of India and South
Africa as case studies. In section 4, the Nigerian case is explored
more in-depth with respect to ICT access and the nature of
economic disparities in the country. Section 5 highlights some
opportunities for e-governance to reduce the disparities, while key
challenges to realizing this are presented in section 6. Section 7
concludes the paper.
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2. METHODOLOGY
A review of two country cases studies – India and South Africa –
is undertaken to examine what the experience of countries with
similar large populations and economic conditions have been with
respect to bridging the digital divide. This is supported by
examining the latest available official data on ICT use and poverty
distribution at sub-national level for the country to determine
whether a relationship exists between access to ICTs and
economic development. For this purpose, access to ICTs is
measured by the percentage of persons who own or have access to
personal computers, mobile phones and internet access.
Economic development, on the other hand, is indicated by the
relative poverty (percentage) rate. Given the strong correlation
between access to internet, and access to personal computers
(estimated at 0.83, or 83%), and the fact that the data series for the
latter is more complete than the former “access to personal
computers” is selected as the better indicator of ICT access, and
hence the measure of the digital divide in Nigeria.
Data is obtained from Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics
(NBS) General Household Survey (2010/11) which produced data
on ICT use in Nigeria, as well as the Harmonised Nigeria Living
Standard Survey (2009/10) which produced data on relative
poverty.
3. COMPARATIVE COUNTRY CASE
STUDIES
In this section, we discuss the cases of India and South Africa:
two countries that have undertaken considerable efforts to bridge
the digital divide among sub-national entities and regions in their
domains. India’s global leadership in the IT industry is wellacknowledged
1 . The second most populous nation in the world,
India ranked 125 th on the UN E-Government Development Index
(EGDI) in 2012. India is one of the countries where
telecommunication development activities have gained
momentum in the past decade. Efforts have been made from both
governmental and non-governmental platforms to enhance
telecommunication infrastructure, provide modern technologies to
serve all segments of India’s culturally-diverse society, and to
transform the country into a IT powerhouse. However, the digital
divide still remains significant between rural and urban India [7],
[8]. While the major cities are even at par with some developed
countries, rural areas in states like Eastern Bihar and Orissa are
worse off than several least-developed countries. With respect to
teledensity 2 for example, according to the Telecom Regulatory
Authority of India (TRAI) while States like Delhi and Chennai
have more phones than people (with >100% teledensity rate) the
teledensity in States like Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand are as low as
4.18% and 3.49% respectively. India has around half a million
software developers and is second only to the US, but 300,000
Indian villages do not have a phone connection, 26 per cent of the
population lies below the poverty line and 35 per cent illiterate.
There are only 5 PCs per 1000 people, 9 mobile lines per 1000
and 37 fixed lines per 1000 people in India, which is extremely
low when compared to China.
1 This section relies on [4]
2
Number of landline telephones in use per 100 individuals living
in an area.