The reality is that it will take a few years to get things working back because of the disequilibrium occasioned by the displacement of economic means of empowerment across all strata of the world societies and economy.
While government and private sectors are battling to return to the post crunch positions, citizens will have to be empowered through informational services and access to services that will reduce their cost of citizenship and hence improve governance. Most government revenue financials projections from citizens taxations and collectibles are projected to fall too since most people will try all they could to avoid such statutory payments since they now have lower income to play around with and obvious increasing cost of living and doing business.
Mobile government has been very successful in countries with similar demographics with Nigeria and they are counting the blessings. It has significantly reduced the cost of governance and increased the citizens participation at all levels. It has build confidence at all levels and this empowers the leaders to be more focused to deliver the dividends of democracy.
In a country like ours, where internet penetration is limited to the urban cities, limited literacy and huge cost of deployment, The mobile phone is easily a cheap means and ubiquitous channel to reach the masses. Internet penetration is currently hovering around the 10 percent mark while mobile penetration has gone further to reach almost half of the population with over 70 percent penetration with 55 million users, under an addressable market of 140 million people. This is quite impressive and significant growth is expected in 2009. No country in Africa is currently in the top rank 50 for e-govt index which Sweden leads the pack but with mobile govt, it can quickly change the outlook since citizens are not required to be e-ready to participate in Mobile government.
Mobile Government can be defined "as a strategy and its implementation involving the utilization of all kinds of wireless and mobile technology, services, applications and devices for improving benefits to the parties involved in e-government including citizens, businesses and all government units" (Kushchu and Kuscu, 2003). M-Govt will increase citizens participation, cost reduction, increase efficiency, transforming public sector organizations, reaching a significant number of the citizens which is not presently possible with the present medium of engagement.
Some services that can be provisioned in broad platforms are Government to government (G2G) and business to government. (B2G) Government to government services are designed to make the internal functioning and communication within a public agency more efficient. For example, a public employee working outside the office (i.e. field workers) can use SMS to send information to the office. Such services can be developed by the government itself (G2G) or by businesses(B2G).A road traffic agent working for the likes of FRSC or Lasma can check with sms the traffic status of a road offender with the Back end office applications.
Government to business (G2B) M-city services from government to businesses aim to answer the following questions: "how to provide businesses with city information in the most timely manner" and "can mobile technologies contribute". In most cases, businesses have a good access to Internet, which makes it reasonable to focus on such services where mobile phones have a clear advantage over the Internet.
Government to Citizen (G2C) and business to Citizen (B2C) Most of the m-services that are launched are probably government to citizen or business to citizen services. Such services are aimed at making the communication between citizens and city government (or a public agency) more convenient or, to use mobile technologies to provide some Government service in a better way.
The widespread use and high penetration rate of mobile telephony (in the world, compared to Internet penetration) combined with the high personal nature of mobile technologies seem to create interesting possibilities for government services/applications. The number of people having access to mobile phones and mobile internet (connection) is still increasing rapidly as well. Mobile access is becoming a common good for many people and 'we' have become used to the anywhere, anyplace, anytime communication, information and entertainment society.
Nevertheless, there are a number of technical challenges as well that need to be taken for m-government to be successful (for example, interoperability, security, and privacy). Besides the technical challenges, a number of organizational and/or cultural aspects need to be taken into consideration as well.
M-Government is not meant to usurp the successes recorded so far with e-Govt but to strongly complement it in reaching the masses in a cost effective way using a channel that is reachable, twenty four hours of the Day.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Emmanuel Okoegwale
Quelle/Source: ZDNet UK, 18.02.2009
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