Considerations for Co-Designing e-Government Services in Under-Served Rural Communities

Abstract

Electronic government (e-Government) is expected to play a critical role of enabling the attainment of best practices of governance. Despite various efforts to implement e-Government, its use by the populace remains low. There are claims that e-government promotes social exclusion of those in under-served rural communities on technical, language, costs and culture grounds. As such, this study assumes a co-designing and co-creation approach in an attempt to incorporate different contextual factors resulting from cultural surroundings, capacities and skills among rural population. The aim is to promote electronic participation by rural based citizens and attain social inclusivity. Users based in under-served rural communities shall be engaged in identifying characteristics of e-Government and issues with rural ICT. The study makes use of solar powered technology (mobile phone and internet access) provided by the “Fusion Grid” project. Selected e-Government services are used to experiment the process of co-designing and co-creation of e-Government.