Quality assessment of e‐government websites in Sub‐Saharan Africa: A public values perspective

The evaluation of e‐government websites has received considerable attention over the years; however, the public values perspective of e‐government websites have been widely overlooked, especially in developing countries. This is worrisome as one of the primary goals of e‐government websites is to deliver public values, since these sites are often the main platform for government interaction with other stakeholders. As such, this study bridged the existing knowledge gap by evaluating 279 e‐government websites from 31 countries in Sub‐Saharan Africa, based on the public values perspective. The examined public values included accessibility, citizen engagement, development of trust, responsiveness, dialogue, and quality of information and services. The results showed that the performance of Sub‐Saharan Africa e‐government websites was highly unsatisfactory when it comes to the delivery of public values. This possibly provides an explanation as to why the region has been consistently ranked the worst in terms of e‐government development, as e‐government development focuses on public values delivery. The study culminates by providing both practical, theoretical, and policy implications of the findings.