E-government in Tanzania: Current Status and Future Challenges

The public sector plays an important role in the economic growth and development of developing countries. The application of modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) may help improve the public sector by contributing to new services and processes that address citizens as well as government-to-government services, involve citizens more directly in decisions being made, and contribute to streamlining work processes and standardizations needed to develop a well-functioning public sector. Research focusing on E-government in developing countries is still dominated by case studies and conceptual pieces of work. Thus, more empirical-oriented work is needed to expand our knowledge on current status, challenges and future plans.

The reported study has been initiated to address such needs. The objective is to investigate, from a broad perspective, on-going E-government initiatives in the public sector in Tanzania. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, the descriptive findings are important to gain insight into the current status of E-government projects in Tanzania. Second, the study reported here could guide the way forward for practice as well as research. We firmly believe that both practice and research should be based on the current situation and identified challenges and aim to describe such issues to guide future work.