Research in African E-Local Governance

The potential of ICT to contribute to good governance has been known for a long time and has been the subject of many articles and reports, but very little concrete empirical evidence of the effects of ICT on governance, and how these effects should be evaluated, exist. The situation is even worse when we examine ICT and governance local governments. First, drawing upon available literature on e-Government and e-Governance, this paper proposes a research framework for assessing effects of e-Government projects on good governance. In the process, first, it adopts UNDP's nine characteristics of good governance which represent an adequate operational definition of good governance before focusing on three key applications of e-Government. Second, drawing on outcome monitoring and evaluation, the paper proposes a research framework for assessing the e-Governance outcomes as well as a set of good governance outcome indicators. The paper illustrates the usefulness of the framework by providing the generic outcome indicators developed by LOG-IN Africa and outlining a study that was carried out in Kenya following the same framework. Third, suggesting that the proposed framework is a good starting point for investigating e-Governance outcomes, the paper invites researchers to test the framework and create the required knowledge in this area.