Harnessing e-Government Adoption in the SADC Region: a Conceptual Underpinning

There has recently been an escalation of e-Government initiatives in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, with South Africa, Mauritius, Seychelles and Botswana leading the way towards this cause. Evidence indicates e-Government implementation projects in this region either fail or succeed. Therefore it is important that before actual implementation is commissioned, there is need to understand the different challenges that come with e-Government implementations such as investment risks, failure to be adopted by the general citizenry, abandoning already-commissioned e-Government activities, and so forth. Such problems can be avoided by putting in place a properly and carefully authored e-Government adoption strategy that takes care of the local context and the multi-dimensionality of e-Government. This paper, with strong reference to Davis' 1989 Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) theoretical underpinning, proposes a conceptual e-Government adoption model that may be commensurate with promoting the growth of e- Government in the SADC region. However, the limitation of this proposed model is that it has not been empirically tested and leaves room for its further validation. The paper follows up on the status of e-Government implementation in the SADC region by presenting two case studies that detail what interventions and initiatives have been put in place to encourage e-Government in Botswana and Zambia.