Improving Online Public Services
Are you working on online public services and wish to benefit from SEMA e-government feedback services?
SEMA is working with Humanity Solutions for the development of tools that help evaluate online public service experiences of citizens.
East Africa is a growing area economically and is moving forward technologically at a fast pace. The improvement of E-government, or online public services is both a condition as well as a catalyst in this regard. It significantly simplifies knowledge accumulation throughout society. It can replace the need for physical offices altogether or allow citizens to participate in decision-making processes. E-government can improve the ease of doing business, bring significant cost reductions and help tackle corruption. In short, when done well, it has the potential to revolutionize the overall functioning of states, bringing about much more effective governance for the citizenry.
Focusing on Kenya
SEMA is focusing its e-government attention on Kenya for now, a technological center in sub-Saharan Africa, with a rapidly growing 17% of its population using social media. It is also a country where important e-government strides have been made already. Kenyan Citizens and Foreign Residents can already apply for some Government to Citizen (G2C) services like setting up a business and pay via mobile money, debit Cards or eCitizen agents. Further ambitions are clearly outlined in the Kenya ICT authority strategic plan 2020-2024.
The Kenya Digital Report found that 97% of all internet users in Kenya access the internet on mobile phones, with those Kenyans spending over four and a half hours every day using the internet on their phones, watching short videos being the most popular content-related activity across all age groups. 5G is being rolled out in some areas in the course of this year. As a segment of the overall population, GSMA places the mobile internet penetration rate in Kenya at 27% of its people, representing one of the highest five-year growth rates in Africa.
Our Offer
SEMA has already proven it is able to incentivize and advocate for concrete public service improvements. It can also improve and monitor the quality of online public services over time. Since SEMA started, 69% of the offices where we deploy our tools have improved their service delivery and 46% have reduced their waiting times.
SEMA is now offering two services to city councils and public institutions that wish to improve their citizen-facing websites.
A scorecard with feedback from SEMA’s in-house evaluation team
The current status of your website is reviewed and a scorecard is compiled by SEMA’s in-house evaluation team and discussed with the Website management team. The scorecard has been developed considering specific needs of the East African region while considering international standards and online citizen engagement benchmarks
An e-citizen feedback panel
SEMA sets up an e-citizen panel, gathers its feedback, and delivers its results to the Website management team in a concise form. Whereas the young, urban, educated or entrepreneurial stand to benefit from more complex or interactive online public services, there is a risk that the older or more rural population gets left behind. Our methodology strives to give both segments of the population a voice.
Get in touch
We are constantly in touch with foundations, sponsors, and donors who care about effective e-government public services in the region. We specifically welcome new partners who are interested in working on developing our e-gov tools in Kenya this year.