Opportunity and overview of SMS-based e-government in developing countries

Despite the large number of e-government initiatives in developing countries, most of the initiatives have failed. Possible causes of the failures include: low Internet penetration, high Internet costs and Internet illiteracy. Rather than forcing citizens to upgrade their current devices and knowledge by promoting e-government through PCs and Internet access, this paper proposes a bottom-up development approach utilising the currently popular communications technology in developing countries, mobile phones and the Short Message Service (SMS) application. The advantages of initially using SMS to deliver e-government services in developing countries include: a large number of users with appropriate skills, low cost as users already have mobile phones, and an adequate infrastructure. For these reasons SMS-based e-government can be utilised by more people in developing countries than Internet-based e-government. This paper focuses on the potential of SMS-based e-government in low and lower middle-income countries (as defined by World Bank indicators). It includes an analysis of the present applications of SMS-based e-government in some of these countries.