icegov2012 proceedings

Electronic Participation System: The Nigerian Perspective
ABSTRACT
The emergence of e-Governance has transformed the way
Governments carry out their businesses using Information &
Communication Technology (ICT). The application of egovernance
can be characterized in three major areas, namely
Communication, citizen participation, and monitoring and
evaluation of government projects.
This paper, titled ‘Electronic Participation System: The Nigerian
Perspective’ will show case an innovation being introduced to
project monitoring and citizenry inclusion at Federal Government
level. This will bring transparency, effective reporting by
supervising Ministries, enhanced communication, citizen
participation and project monitoring, and ultimately good
governance and elimination of corruption.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
D.2.11 Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), C.0 System
Application Architecture, J.3 Cellular Computing, B.7.2 Verify
and K.4.1 – Fifth Generation Project
General Terms
Management, Performance, and Verification.
Keywords
Electronic Participation; e-Government; Citizen; Innovation;
Project monitoring; Grassroots; ICT; mobile phones.
1. INTRODUCTION
The Nigerian Government has since recognized the need to evolve
itself through reforms and modernization of its processes using
information technology otherwise known as electronic
Governance. The Electronic Government focuses on the Back-
Office processes and operations, while the electronic Governance
focuses on the coordination, interoperability between three tiers of
Government and citizens’ inclusion.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
Ibrahim Aliyu
Federal Secretariat, Shehu Shagari
Complex, Abuja. Nigeria
(234) 805-318-0580; (234) 802-417-6068
i_aliyu@yahoo.co.uk
468
It is against this background that the Office of the Secretary to the
Government of the Federation (OSGF) under “The Presidency”
reviewed the critical pillar of a successful e-
Government/Governance, namely:
i. Citizen Centricity: This is about being citizen focused
by all service providers for effective service delivery.
This brought about the Service Charter in the public
service, by putting in place a structure for effective
transformation and citizen centricity campaign.
ii. Standardisation of Common infrastructure: This will
facilitate data sharing or reuse at least within the
Government structure.
iii. Governance: Coordination and interoperability in
government facilitate the provision of effective and
efficient service delivery by government. The Nigerian
Government has since noted the importance of
Information Technology (IT) or “e” for the coordination
and interoperability among Ministries, Departments and
Agencies.
iv. New Organisational Model: the quest for innovation and
Citizen-Centric Government Services as fundamental to
effective and efficient e-Governance. Hence, innovation
such as electronic Participation System.
v. Social/Citizens inclusion: The concept of e-Governance
is not only the provision of online services, but also
bridging the gap between Government and its citizenry
in such a way that trust and accountability will be built,
and consequently all citizen will participate in
governance. Therefore, as a first step, it was realized
that the easiest way for the citizens inclusion is through
programmes and project monitoring.
2. ELECTRONIC PARTICIPATION
SYSTEM
The e-Participation System is a software application that will
provide a platform for Government to interface with the Nigerian
public through ‘Short Message Service’ (SMS) using the mobile
phones for the purpose of monitoring or tracking implementation
of Government Projects. Study indicates that over 99 million
Nigerian have access to mobile phones, therefore making the
OSGF to contemplate taking that advantage of the mobile phones
technology and internet facility to connect to its citizenry. It is
expected that such feedback will enable Government to monitor
projects’ progress, completed project performance, ongoing