Reducing Corruption in African Developing Countries: The Relevance of E-Governance

This paper presents a review on reducing corruption in African developing countries, to lessen the discretion of officials, and increase transparency.While it is true that ICT eliminates many opportunities for corruption for those who do not understand the new technology fully, however, it opens up new corruption vistas for those who understand the new systems well enough to manipulate them.Therefore proper safeguards are needed.Putting in place systemic hurdles may prevent people from abusing their power for private gain.While complete eradication of corruption is difficult to achieve, much can be done in reducing its prevalence.ICT can support actors wishing to improve governance capacity and fight corruption, but the surrounding political, social and infrastructural environment will decide if the technology is to be used to its fullest potentials.Automating existing bureaucratic processes that are defective will not yield good results.In this paper, we propose a methodology to combat corruption using information and communication technologies (ICT) that entails process restructuring.Most developing countries are not fully ready to embrace a comprehensive program of e-government, thus transparency is not holistic in all the sectors.Rather than wait for total readiness, an approach of learning by trial and consolidating small gains are recommended.While e-Governance holds great promise in many developing countries however, substantial challenges are to be tackled.Many ICT projects fail because of insufficient planning capacity and political instability.