Can e-Government Systems Bridge the Digital Divide?

Electronic Government systems are often seen as panacea in the remedy of all failings of governance. With a history span of almost two decades, e-government implementations have often reached dead ends and have regularly failed to deliver the promise that the governments that have initiated them have made to their citizens. Despite an abundance of development models and best case scenarios identified in literature, e-government services are continually failing to attract the citizens and to capture their trust and faith. The main reason quoted for such failures is the lack of innovation and inclusivity in the way a service is designed and delivered.
The digital divide is the major risk of marginalizing sectors of society or even whole continents due to lack of access to web based services. In the developing world it is mainly the lack of, or poor infrastructure that maintains and often widens the divide, while in the developed world it is lack of skills and difficulty of accessing services that leads citizens to abandon their efforts in using services online. Whatever the reason that leads to non-access of services the effect is similar and those citizens that fall victim to it are increasingly consumed into the trap of the digital divide.
Efforts and initiatives to address the divide have primarily focused on building the infrastructure and providing access to the web. However, the quality and accessibility of online services is quite often then reason why citizens distance themselves from web-based services and the internet in total.
This paper attempts to explore the shortfall in criteria for evaluating a government’s efforts in planning, implementing and delivering services that address the operational requirements of efficient government, but equally cater for the needs of the citizens as end users of the service.