Evaluating Digital Public Services: a contingency value approach within three ‘exemplar’ sub-Sahara developing countries

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This article is © (2019) Emerald Group Publishing and permission has been granted for this version to appear here: https://bradscholars.brad.ac.uk. Emerald does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited.Peer-Reviewed
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openAccessAccepted for publication
17/09/2018
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This paper considers recent field evidence to analyse what online public services citizens need, explores potential citizen subsidy of these specific services and investigates where resources should be invested in terms of media accessibility. We explore these from a citizen-centric affordability perspective within three ‘exemplar’ developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The World Bank and United Nations in particular promote initiatives under the ‘Information and Communication Technologies for Development’ (ICT4D) to stress the relevance of e-Government as a way to ensure development and reduce poverty. We adopt a ‘Contingency Value’ method to conceptually outline reported citizens willingness to pay for digital public services. Hence, our focus is mainly upon an empirical investigation through extensive fieldwork in the context of sub-Sahara Africa. A substantive survey was conducted in the respective cities of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Lagos (Nigeria) and Johannesburg (South Africa). The sample of citizens was drawn from each respective Chamber of Commerce database for Ethiopia and South Africa, and for Nigeria a purchased database of businesses, based on stratified random sampling. These were randomly identified from both sectors ensuring all locations were covered with a total sample size of 1,297 respondents. It was found, in particular, that citizens were willing to pay to be able to access digital public services and that amounts of fees they were willing to pay varied depending on what services they wish to access and what devices they use (PCs or mobile phones).Version
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Tassabehji R, Hackney R and Maruyama T (2019) Evaluating Digital Public Services: a contingency value approach within three ‘exemplar’ sub-Sahara developing countries. Information Technology and People. 32(4): 1021-1043.Link to Version of Record
https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-08-2017-0260Type
Articleae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-08-2017-0260