Democratic Governance
E-governance and Access to Information

Mapping of UNDP e-governance Activities

Background

UNDP's approach to e-governance centers on the provision of basic public services and information to the poor and marginalized populations while, at the same time, enhancing people's participation in public policy and decision-making process through networks and networking.

Framework

As a broad and still evolving area, e-governance covers many areas of the current public investment in ICTs. There is thus a need to develop a typology to classify the various kinds of e-governance activities. Based on the extensive work that UNDP has done in the last years in this area, the following typology has been developed. It has 3 core elements complemented by 3 cross-cutting components. These are described below.

Core Components

• E-administration
  Public ICT investments to foster transparency and accountability within public institutions, both national and local, to improve their functioning. This component is usually linked to Public Administration Reform (PAR)and state modernization programmes.
• E-service delivery
  Public ICT investments to foster efficiency and transparency of public institutions in providing public services in all sectors.This component is related to PAR, local governance, and access to justice programmes.

• E-participation
  E-participation: Public ICT investments to foster interaction between public institutions and citizens to promote better policies, services and public operations. It includes three levels: information provision to citizens, consultation with citizens, and dialogue between government and citizens. This component is usually linked to voice and accountability, civil society strengthening, and parliamentary development among others.

The three cross-cutting components include

• Policy Environment and Regulation
  Public investments to support the creation and implementation of ICTD and e-governance policies, legislation and regulation as well as to build the internal institutional capacities of the public entities involved in policy design, implementation and oversight. In principle, such policies should be closely related to broader national development goals.
• Access to ICT and Connectivity
  ICT investments in public and private information infrastructure, connectivity and equipment to foster wider use by people. A typical example are telecenters or, more generally, the deployment of public access points. This area of work is typical of the broader ICTD field.
• Access to Information (A2I)
  Public ICT investments to promote the digitalization and dissemination of public information among the overall population. It is closely linked to the broader field of access to information, A2I, which, in UNDP's work, refers to promoting the creation of national legislation on A2I i.e.,'freedom of information acts'.

Overview of Results

Distribution of projects by category

Most of the projects are focused in two categories, e-administration (31 projects) and access to information via ICT (27 projects), followed by e-services (21 projects), e-participation (15 projects), policy and regulation (13 projects), and access and connectivity (10 projects).

Regional Distribution of Projects

Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (EE/CIS) and Asia and Pacific (AP) are the regions have the most projects, with 32 and 26 respectively. The Arab States region and Africa come next with 20 projects each followed by Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) 19 projects each.

However, when it comes to project expenditures the picture changes dramatically. Here, the main part of the projects expenditures takes place in LAC with almost $64 million (or 50 percent of total expenditures) followed by Asia and Pacific with $25.9 million.