Abstract:
The Kenya government has been making significant attempts to make its services and
information on the Internet available in the recent past. The success of these efforts
depends to a great extent, on how well the targeted users i.e. the citizens in general make
use of the services and information. A UN E-Government survey conducted in 2008
indicates that Kenya ranks very low on citizen usage of E-Government with an index of
0.04 ranking position 146 out of the 189 countries surveyed globally.
The purpose of this research was to develop a framework for increasing public
participation of E-Government services in Kenya. Towards achieving this goal, the
research set to investigate the factors that influence E-Government adoption and to
explore on what needs to be done to improve adoption.
The research was conducted in two stages. Using an extension of the technology
acceptance model, a survey was conducted to find out the factors influencing EGovernment
services in Kenya. The proposed research model was validated using data
collected using 700 questionnaires distributed to commercial cybercafes in seven towns
across the Country. 523 valid responses were received. The results of this survey were
used to propose a framework for increasing public participation. The framework was
validated using data collected from 89 Internet users.
The findings of this study have various implications for research as well as practice. For research the factors that influence E-Government usage were discussed. For practice, the
findings of this study provide a generic framework for implementation of E-Government
frameworks. Its finding can be used by government in developing countries as a guide
when developing E-Government services. The major limitation to this study was the
inability to include non - cybercafe users in our study. This could have introduced a bias
in the findings.
