Issued by: Dept of Public Service & Administration
15 April 2002
In an e-government conference in Parlemo for two days, a clear vision of government's use of electronic government to improve service delivery became a centrepiece. This is the conference that was attended by approximately 400 delegates from Information Technology companies, Non-Governmental Organisations and senior leaders in government across the globe. The outcome of this conference will be presented to the coming G8 meeting to be held in Canada.
As the Ministry responsible for Information Technology in government, paving the way for the work to be undertaken by our President during Nepad discussion at the G8. We presented precise plans on e-government designed to demonstrate South Africa's awareness of the general trends and best practices in e-government across the world. Furthermore that South Africa's context is unique, and has therefore focused our attention on solving some critical developmental issues that are integral to a successful e-government implementation, such as access, job creation/entrepreneuralism and sustainability. No one can disagree that these are issues that are also close to the heart of many developing countries and links of our programme to NEPAD.
E-government, has the set of tools and mechanisms that enable governments to improve access to, and quality of, services, therefore has equal relevance to all nations, regardless of their developmental status. There are numerous possibilities that e-government presents us, but government wants to ensure implementation of e-government is informed by an overall approach to the rights and responsibilities that are captured in our Constitution. Three important elements that are of outmost important to us are; access to services, sustainability and job creation.
Access to services is at the heart of e-government and e-government is primarily about access - creating access to services for citizens, through the means most convenient to them. That is the long-term goal. Before reaching this goal, we will need to provide convenience that is at the very least an improvement on the current context.
We accept that the in short term we will improve access to services for people who have personal access to PCs and can use the Internet directly to transact. However, our success is dependent on having to traverse the divides of geography, income group and culture to substantially improve access for every single citizen to services.
The roll-out of a large-scale access programme should not start from ground zero. Where possible existing institutions, both within government and external to it, should be drawn into partnership with government to facilitate access to services. Government's approach is to maximise and empower what exists, then build what is lacking. This will include 6,000 access points for citizens, in the form of walk-in kiosks, or through self-help kiosks.
Government has to date 23 multi-purpose community centers that have been planned for and developed by communities themselves, and present the face of government within rural and deep rural areas. We have engaged the Post Office out of our recognition of their incredible reach, the use of financial institutions in particular their ATM is also under discussions.
These all-present valuable resources that are currently delivering isolated services - an amazing backbone upon which government can partnership with on e-government.
Addressing the financing issues needs greater level of creativity. While government will not ask our citizens to pay service fee to access services that are their basic rights, certainly a service fee for the convenience of paying for violations of laws, such as traffic fines, should be expected.
In this manner, we are developing a model of cross-subsidisation that will support the programme into the future.
In a nutshell government wants to ensure that within ten years every citizen should be only 5 minutes away from government services, either physically or electronically
The significant resources that need to be leveraged for a full e-government implementation should ensure that maximum benefits are derived through the creation of sustainable job opportunities and the supporting of small businesses.
Whilst our large technology partners are obviously important to us, but government must also actively address how we incubate and support small technology entrepreneurs to maintain our systems into the future. The magnitude of e-government rollout pesent significant business opportunities for small business. A holistic strategy to fully equip them should include, licensing SMMEs to be technology partners to the multi-nationals, developing their capacity to plan and budget to maintain their business operations, and developing their marketing capacity to not rely solely on our contracts Secondly, the use of intermediaries in the form of single-person agencies or small businesses to act as physical contact points for accessing government services forms a key component of our access strategy. Already the tele-centres that have been established through the Universal Services Agency work on an agency basis, with cost-recoveries built into the business model.
Government is also paying careful attention to Transforming our public servants into multi-skilled agents of service delivery. The creation of citizen access points will require front-line staff who speak as government, and not as line functionaries. This requires an entirely new orientation for our public servants, which we believe will also offer enormous developmental opportunities for them. Public servants need to develop them into problem-solvers and solution-generators. This does require large-scale training and re-orientation programmes that link directly to government's overall strategy on development and career pathing of public servants.