Towards Active Citizen-Centric E-Government Systems for Developing Countries

The importance of citizen’s participation in government cannot be overemphasized. Governments in many developing countries have made efforts, in spite of their infrastructural and financial limitations, to uphold the virtues of participatory e-governance with limited success. A major cause of this elusive success is the design of e-government platforms, which doesn’t encourage usage by the stakeholders of e-government. Many governments in developing countries are settling for other means to communicate with citizens. In this work, a new architectural framework is proposed that uses knowledge management facilities to enhance web-based e-governance and encourage participation, thus allowing for the elicitation of knowledge from online discourse. The country examined in this article is Nigeria. However, it is likely that many other African and developing countries have similar experiences. This work will aid in the improvement of web-based e-government platforms for such countries.