Good governance is about streamlining information to increase transparency and to ensure that the most vulnerable people in society will have a voice in the decision-making processes and that the views of minorities will be taken into account. Its key attributes are participation, transparency, responsiveness, effectiveness, efficiency and accountability.

Transparent processes, the effective interaction between local and national governments, and the involvement of the private sector and civil society are crucial. IICD’s ICT-enabled governance initiatives in Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Ecuador, Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia help local communities to voice their needs, learn about public services and to pressure policy makers to engage in regular dialogue.

IICD helps governments to improve their efficiency by using ICT to improve data and workflows. By enhancing information flows both between and within local communities and districts, IICD both supports and improves decentralisation processes.

IICD’s Governance programme differs from other IICD programmes. Operating at the district, provincial and national levels, participation and governance projects are generally of a much larger scale than those in other sectors.

Results for 2007

In 2007, IICD supported 24 projects covering the areas of:

• E-administration: These projects involved supporting more efficient and effective planning and management by local governments, such as the District Net project in Uganda and the Kinondoni project in Tanzania.
• E-services: These projects involved the provision of digital government information to improve the access and quality of government services to citizens. Examples included the Ghana.gov portal of the government of Ghana and the educational portal of the Ministry of Education in Bolivia.
• E-society: These projects involved increasing the transparency of government activities through the monitoring of government information or the development of alternative information sources by civil-society organisations. We can refer to several projects that monitored the transparency of government information in Ecuador, while a project supporting the indigenous organisation CIDOB in Bolivia supports a database that contains details of indigenous land titles.

The users in this sector are primarily civil servants and technical staff from civil-society organisations. On the basis of the opinions collected about the projects over the last six years, we can determine the following trends:

• In the Governance sector, projects operate primarily in the capital city and provincial and district towns, resulting in the reduced opportunity for a rural presence. This holds for government and civil-society projects, both of which focus on more centralised services.
• The character of the participating government and civil-society institutions explains the higher income and education levels of the users. In the same way, the more limited participation of women can be explained by the lower percentage of female civil servants in the participating government institutions.
• Satisfaction, awareness and empowerment levels have remained high over the past few years^[1], fluctuating between 60% and 80%. Differences over the years can be attributed to the complex nature of keeping government-related information up-to-date and at a consistently high level of quality. This may explain the high levels of impact amongst the governance projects in Bolivia, where from the very beginning partners prioritised the provision of relevant information to their target groups.
• In 2007, the impact on indicators relating to Participation and Governance – including the efficiency of administration and transparency of government information – was the highest of all the sectors. The impact has increased considerably over the last four years, reaching its highest levels in 2007.