Public service minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi has expressed the need to urgently address the digital divide between elites and ordinary citizens in developing countries, saying the move would ensure that the latter were not left behind.

Addressing delegates at the four-day e-Africa workshop in Johannesburg yesterday, Minister Fraser-Moleketi said the time was right to seize the digital opportunity, adding that the delay for the African continent, as the rest of the world progressed, would only enforce historical patterns of inequality.

"This demands that there must be both a strategic and a tactical response that attacks the current challenges to e-governance for development hard and head-on," she explained.

She said e-governance was at the heart of two global shifts - the information revolution and the governance revolution.

"Both shifts are changing the way society operates and is governed. They bring the opportunity for not just incremental but radical gains in efficiency and effectiveness".

The e-Africa workshop seeks to address the strategic and tactical challenges of implementing e-governance on the continent.

Its outcomes will have an important link to infrastructure development and the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to boost the continent's economic potential.

The workshop, attended by over 400 government delegates from Africa, is being held under the banner of the continent's economic recovery plan, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad) - BuaNews.