Q&A: How e-governance can change Africa

ABIDJAN — As Africa becomes increasingly digitally connected, the introduction of e-governance could be a tool that increases government efficiency, accountability, and transparency. Countries such as Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Mauritius have already introduced national ICT policies that established centralized information data centers as well as installing a national fiber-optic backbone network that increased internet accessibility and affordability. Their ICT strategies recognize the sector as an enabler of socioeconomic development, political decentralization, and sound governance. Technology experts in Estonia — a place where 99 percent of all public services are available online — argue Africa could be the next frontier for e-governance, leapfrogging traditional governance infrastructure in a way that was seen with the explosion of mobile technology on the continent. However, national governments still need to address barriers such as underdeveloped telecommunications infrastructures, limited political support, and low literacy rates. “In Estonia, it all started four years after our independence [in 1990] when there was the idea of creating an information society, this government data backbone,” explained Riho Kurg, product manager of Cybernetica, the company responsible for creating Estonia’s e-government solutions and e-voting technology. “It was a good time to take the best technology and start integrating agencies and people already saw back then that [it] is mandatory to have a digital identification and with that it’s possible to do so many things,” he explained. During a recent visit to Kenya, Kurg spoke to Devex about the opportunities for e-governance in Africa and dispelled any skepticism that the success in Estonia — a country of 1.5 million inhabitants — could not be duplicated in African nations of up to 200 million. “It was like the future that would never come but now it’s a reality,” Kurg said. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Where exactly do you see opportunities for e-governance in Africa? One of the cornerstones of Estonia’s success was that we were able to start without legacy [prior technology]. African countries are in the same position Estonia was only 20 years ago when we were able to skip mainframes and big proprietary networks and a lot of this legacy technology. African countries can skip the part with computers and physical ID cards. Most internet use there is mobile-based and African countries don’t have to use old technologies. They can take the current test technologies there are and build from there. Because of that, it’s possible that a country such as Namibia is using a newer version of governmental data backbone software than what’s being used in Estonia because in Estonia we have legacy to support, old systems to maintain. Nobody wants to migrate so that means that Estonia, in some sense, is already on the legacy side and lagging behind. When I meet software developers in Ghana or Nigeria, they have already this new way of thinking. For them, the world is already here, a technological new world, of mobile devices, of cloud information storage. For African countries, this is the only way to build something. You have to build something in the cloud, you have to build on mobile because this is what’s available and what people use. So skipping a large portion of technological legacy is a good way to go ahead, but at the same time it’s possible to learn from the mistakes and not copy. What are the essential foundations that are needed to introduce e-governance in Africa? African countries have the best tools available, but how to use them and create governments that are useful for each country is more of a local decision. There are just some principles that can be taken into consideration. Like one single digital ID is a good thing to have. Opening up data access and not duplicating data is a good thing to have. These are a very few cornerstones, but how do you build on these cornerstones? From what I have seen is that there are a lot of people in African countries that can do it. Every country is different when building an e-government. But they still can use the same cornerstones, like maintaining data ownership. These are the cornerstones which anything else can be built. What would you say to skeptics that say that e-governance was easy to implement in Estonia, a country of 1.5 million, because you are working on a smaller scale compared to the size of African countries? The beauty of ICT systems is that they tend to be very scalable — in the essence, scaling up the technology is just a technical task. It takes time operationally, but the basic principle of the data registry or document registry or any other thing, it’s just a bigger database. So, yes in Estonia the governmental databases are small, but they are doing the same thing. What’s most important here is not the data, but the processes. Those processes are the same if we are talking about 1 million, or 40 million like in Ghana, or 200 million like in Nigeria. The thing that you’re doing with the data, or if you are looking for a record on the database, it’s simply a bigger database. While issues like corruption and data mismanagement remain weaknesses of African governments, how can e-governance address these issues? Data collection is an area where every country struggles, not just in Africa. It’s still an issue in Estonia, the United States and other countries. From the corruption side, e-governance systems, with the help of technology, will create a lot of transparency, and transparency is the enemy of corruption. With corruption, you have access to something that no one else has. But if the processes are more transparent and access is more transparent, then this will be less of a concern. Let’s say we are talking about government procurement: The access to information is restricted to those that share this as a source of wealth. But if the data is more accessible in a secure manner, then it will cut down a large portion of corruption. The role of ease of doing business, for example, or the ease of procuring land; if the data is readily available then those processes are more transparent to all the parties and give less chances for corrupt individuals to keep this information for themselves and sell for profit. It’s possible to start small. Start cleaning up the government files, taking it from paper to digital records. This is already a huge step. The second step is sharing this information. There is no magical wand to apply this technology and corruption will be gone in five years, but technology helps to fight it so it goes from one sector to another to another and corruption will be lowered. Of course, it takes a while until it goes down to the grassroots, to the police officers or port officials, but it goes step by step.