The index ranks South Africa ahead of Kenya and Egypt as the African country most ready to embrace mobile government services.
Despite South Africa’s appearance at the top of the index, the analysts noted that until now mobile government implementations have been far slower to take off there than in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania.
Although e-government services are still under-developed in Africa, East African countries have been quicker to realise the benefits to citizens and small businesses.
For example, Kenya launched an open data portal, in July 2011, which allowed access to public data and information to the Internet community.
Using mobile technologies, they’ve been able to deliver public services in the areas of agricultural advice, payment of utility bills and commodity pricing information amongst others.
The report notes that while many of the mobile government services already implemented are in East and North Africa, governments have not used mobile technology as a way of overhauling internal processes and providing more flexibility to their workforces.
“Technology providers in Africa have an opportunity to enable mobile government by encouraging the migration of public sector services to the cloud. Virtualisation of infrastructure and flexible, usage-based pricing would allow government agencies to pay for what they need and flex costs accordingly to match demand. Mobility services should form an integrated part of the public sector’s cloud migration,” suggests Informa analyst, Sheridan Nye.
Informa’s mobile government readiness index is based on the following indicators: mobile penetration; 3G penetration; mobile broadband penetration forecasts; proportion of population living in rural areas; the size of public sector as a % of GDP; UN’s e-Government Readiness Index; fixed broadband penetration and literacy rates.
The index excluded countries with a population less than 5 million.
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Quelle/Source: TechLoy, 09.11.2011
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