Mobile money services, which are all the rage in Africa, come in handy here.
The ubiquity of mobile phones makes them the e-commerce platform of choice for many citizens, most of whom lack access to electricity to power computers, that is if they can afford them.
Governments must therefore turn to mobile phones when thinking up e-government initiatives.
Unfortunately, the development of such initiatives has largely been outside the EAC’s respective monetary authorities, who seem to think that their remit is limited to regulation and revenue collection.
It is time they took the lead in the development of e-commerce standards.
One application of such initiatives would be in e-banking.
It is possible to develop an EAC-wide payment database from which all financial institutions receive daily updates.
Billers would then send details of their bills to these databases perhaps once a day.
The data would then be validated and linked to the individual citizens — perhaps using an EAC-wide identity document or personal identity cards.
Indeed, such a centralised citizen-identity database could form the foundation of lots of other services across the community.
Finally, all banks operating in the EAC would be required to facilitate e-payments through a portal perhaps hosted by the respective EAC member states.
With bills thus linked to individual citizens, and payable from any bank, it would be straightforward for EAC citizens to log onto their bank’s website and select bills to pay.
Even further, it would be possible to electronically transfer funds across the region between bank accounts, and from accounts to mobile phones.
As the EAC’s physical borders disappear, so should our electronic borders, with E-banking as the starting point.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Peter Wanyonyi
Quelle/Source: The East African, 29.03.2010
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