A Review of e-Government Initiatives in Tanzania

Over the last few years, Tanzania has witnessed an increased usage and awareness of e-Government services. This is welcome news to all stakeholders in ensuring that services offered by the government and communications between the government and citizens are efficient and effective. Despite the good news, the reality in most cases has been that the e-Government projects are implemented as technical projects (mostly employing techno-centric approaches), ignoring other important considerations, with the implicit assumption that they will be used by the citizens. In this chapter, the authors conducted a study to assess the quality of provision, level of awareness, and degree of usage of e-Government services in Tanzania. Further, the study presents the challenges and opportunities which the Tanzanian Government faces in realizing its e-Government vision. It demonstrates that the e-Government projects are community projects and their design and implementation must take into account contextual, cultural, and environmental factors.