Taking e-government to the bottom of the pyramid: dial-a-gov?

Much attention has been paid to the use of ICTs to improve the delivery of government services to citizens in developing countries. Government and donor funds have adopted two strategies in parallel: (i) the re-engineering and automating of government services, and (ii) the installation of telecenters (community Internet access centers) for citizens to access reengineered government "e-Gov" services.

The model of delivering e-Gov via the Internet has major drawbacks as shown by survey data representing 397 million people at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) in India, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand. First, only 49% have even heard of the Internet and only 2.6% have used it [15]. Second, it will take a lot more time and significant funds to roll-out enough telecenters to cover the BOP sufficiently. Third, most telecenters fail, while the successful ones are sustained by revenues from non-Internet services such as voice calls, fax and photocopying. But even these revenue streams may dwindle - according to our survey, over 40% of current BOP non-owners plan to purchase a phone within 2 years. They will spend their already-limited communications budgets on phones they own, not at a telecenter.

By viewing the telephone as the end-device for e-service delivery, implementers can automate those parts of a government process that can deliver value quickly, through "smaller" (less complicated, therefore less likely to fail) applications. By not seeking to re-engineer entire government departments, these projects face less resistance to change from public-sector employees. Given that over 90% of those at the BOP use phones already [15], significant use is more likely if the necessary attention is paid to language, design and publicity.

The Internet, accessed at a telecenter, and sophisticated e-Government systems will play a role in providing "higher-end" citizen services, for example submitting a passport application online with an uploaded digital photograph. But at a time when the Internet is barely reaching 10.3 million people at the BOP in these countries, the paper argues that phones are the cheaper, more immediate and ubiquitous tool for Asian governments to inform, transact and interact with almost 400 million of their most needy citizens.

The paper presents an alternative, telephone-centric model for electronic delivery of public services citizens. It draws on research conducted by LIRNEasia in 2006 and previously published as well as unpublished e-Gov case studies.