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The role telecentres play in providing e‐government services in rural areas
Author(s) -
Furuholt Bjørn,
Sæbø Øystein
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
the electronic journal of information systems in developing countries
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.41
H-Index - 18
ISSN - 1681-4835
DOI - 10.1002/isd2.12006
Subject(s) - government (linguistics) , business , tanzania , the internet , rural area , population , internet privacy , marketing , public relations , computer science , political science , geography , world wide web , environmental planning , medicine , environmental health , philosophy , linguistics , law
In this paper, we explore the role played by telecentres for providing e‐government services in rural areas. We do so by reporting from a longitudinal multiple case from Tanzania, one of the least urbanised African countries with only 23% of the population living in urban areas. Telecentres are proposed to operate as multipurpose community information and communication technology access centres offering e‐government services (as well as other services), providing information, transactions, and entitlements. The supply and use of e‐government services is in our cases found to remain almost unchanged over the last 5–10 years, and there is still a long way to go to fully use the advantages and strengths of e‐governments, due to infrastructure (lack of computers and lack of, or slow and unstable, connections), management (lack of marketing and lack of relevant information and services), and human factors (lack of awareness and knowledge among the citizens). Based on our findings, we argue that telecentres still have a role to play, in combination with personal mobile phones, where simple tasks may be performed by mobile phones, with more complex tasks may be done via Internet from telecentres. This combination will still be the best alternative into the future.