INFORMATION & COMMUNICATION UNIVERSITY USA

Yaound Cameroon Campus

Department of Information and Communication Technology

A Term Paper Submitted to the Department of ICT as a Requirement for ICT2130 : E-

Government Course Under the Topic :

By

Fowa Kamga Franck Donald | ICTU1040351 | frank.donaId@ictuniversity.org

Supervised and Reviewed By

Mr. Abdallah Ziraba | abdallah.ziraba@ictuniversity.org

Submitted on:
Monday January 30th, 2017
Abstract:

This study evaluated the extent to which current status of e-government implementation in Cameroon conforms to
the national IT policy strategy agency known as ANTIC (National Agency for Information and Communication
Technology). The study is based on content analysis of some of the official websites of the ministries of the country.
It focuses on the content, functional and construction features of the websites. It was found that, out of the forty-one
ministries websites, few provide downloadable digital documents and functional online interactions. We recommend
that, in addition to the work done by the National Agency for Information and Communication Technology (ANTIC)
for Cameroon, Cameroon government needs to have an established guideline for its e-government implementation
and ANTIC needs to be more proactive in its duty of monitoring IT policy implementation. The site designers should
acknowledge the importance of government websites as the main channels for information dissemination, for
facilitating citizens' interaction with government and for transforming government operations. Thus, the websites
must be more than static notice boards but be function-oriented, dynamic and interactive belt with good technologies
and well secured and in addition they should also have an active presence on social media.
Keywords: content analysis, e-government, Cameroon, Website, evaluation, IT policy,ICT
1. lntroduction
Government and public sector managers have, within the last decade, come to the realization that Information
Communication Technology (ICT) is a viable tool that can help them achieve their aims; deliver efficient and cost
effective services to its citizenry, clients and partners. Cameroon, a burgeoning democracy in Africa, has come to
realize the fact that no developing country or growing economy can be sustained without the integration of ICT with
its development strategy and therefore, has adopted technology aimed at enhancing the growth of her economy. The
Cameroon Government saw the need for the country to participate in the race to becoming a digitized society and
how ICT can empower the people. Due to this, the Head of State and President of the Republic of Cameroon declared
ICT a national priority. Cameroon being a fast growing and lucrative telecommunications and ICT market in Africa
is still ranked low in e-government provision to its citizen.
According to the press release (MOTAZE, 2014) following a government seminar held on Thursday, 27 November
2014 on the development of e-government in Cameroon which in the agenda they were to examine some relevant
experiences in e-government delivery in some sectors namely: the assessment of e-learning, by the Minister for
Higher Education; Cameroons experience in telemedicine (e-health) by the Minister for Public Health; the
implementation of the e-regulations project, by the Minister for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, Social
Economy and Handicrafts; -e-government initiatives in State financial services, by the Minister for Finance; the
implementation of e-government in the Ministry of the Public Service, by the Minister for the Public Service and
Administrative Reform. So after analyzing this points by the competent authorities measures where been taken down
to improve on the system already in place and finally the At the end of these statements, the Head of Government
asked the Secretary-General of his Office, who is also chairman of the PROMAGAR (which was a Program to
modernize Cameroons Government departments through the introduction of results-based management) Steering
Committee, to meet with the Minister in charge of telecommunications to ensure the finalization of the national e-
government strategy accompanied by a master plan for its implementation. He also instructed him to continue actions
to ensure ownership of the stakes and tools of e-government by organizing in the short term a seminar for Secretaries-
General of ministries. Lastly, he enjoined ministers to place at users disposal, on official websites, all administrative
forms in their bilingual versions. In this regards we believe that measures are been taken for Cameroon to meet up
with a great e-government administration system functioning and meeting the citizens need in the nearest feature.

2. Literature Review

As introduce in the previous section the Cameroon government in its mission of making Cameroon an attraction
ground for investors could now be achieved successfully without the digital economy and when we talk of this
digitalized economy first we should think of digitalizing government services, in fact e-government is the road map
to this result and follows with tech startups and industries because industrialization is also what Cameroon is fighting
for among many others. In a survey carried out (Nations, 2014) e-government initiative is evolving in Cameroon as
we see that the ranking left from 147 in the year twenty-twelve to 144 in the year twenty-fourteen and we can equally
see that the survey carried out (United Nations, 2010) for both years twenty-eight and twenty-ten Cameroon by then
did not actually changed it position of 149 which was not that interesting at all. This results could also be clearly
seen below in the following screenshots;

Source: https://publicadministration.un.org/egovkb/Portals/egovkb/Documents/un/2010-Survey/Chapter-4-
World-e-government-rankings.pdf
Source: https://publicadministration.un.org/egovkb/Portals/egovkb/Documents/un/2014-Survey/Chapter1.pdf

So when we look at the above statistics and the various efforts up to date that is more than two year later after the
publish of those statics we could equally believe that many more efforts are been done but the problem that arises is
How good is the result of what is already done?
And the answer to this question is why I decided to pick up to topic, which aims at analyzing the government websites
in Cameroon (Some of the ministries in particular). Because as an IT specialist and also a free thinker I believe
everything start from the medium/platform through which the informations a made available to the citizens and so
if this Web application that is put at the disposal of the public is not well designed especially just even the look and
feel and not even the back end then when people visit it once they will obviously feel reluctant to check the website
next time and in addition to this also the issue of security, confidentiality and privacy comes into place.
The output of my research will be reveal in the subsequent section of this paper but before that we can look at e-
government Benchmarking which according to (Asogwa, 2011) to globally measure the e-government initiative of
member states the United Nations developed a five phase benchmark for assessing their global presence consist of
emerging stage, enhanced phase, interactive phase, transactional, and connected phases which in the following points
I will examined this but making use of (Oni A, 2016) which seems to be more explicit and understandable to its
lowest term as seen below:

Stage 1 - Emerging presence: Here, a government makes its online presence with an official website which include
links to ministries or departments. Information is majorly inactive and there is little or no interaction with citizens.
Stage 2 - Enhanced presence: Governments provide more information on public policy and governance and makes
them easily accessible to citizens. Links are made to record information such as newsletters, documents, reports,
laws etc.

Stage 3 - Interactive presence: Governments provide online services like downloadable forms for applications and
an interactive portal with services to ease their use by citizens

Stage 4 - Transactional presence: This stage enables a two-way contact between 'citizen and government'. It includes
options for paying taxes, applying for ID cards or passports and other functions similar to G2C interactions.

Stage 5 - Networked (or fully integrated) presence: This is the most sophisticated level of e- government
implementation. It integrates all e-government service dimension Government to Government (G2G), Government
to Citizens (G2C) and Government to Business (G2B). At this stage, government, through technology, becomes
proactive in connecting with and answering citizens' needs.

To put a cap on this section i will say the Cameroon e-government vision according to (Sindeu, 2013) Eric Sindeu
During 7th Annual EGOV Forum Organized by Commonwealth Telecommunication Organization (C.T.O) Under
the Theme Implementation Of E-Government in Cameroon held in Muyono, Uganda 25th to 27th march 2013
the following interesting points marks the conclusion of the forum.

The Electronic Governance vision for Cameroon is to effectively use both traditional and new Information and
Communication Technologies (ICT), particularly those related to the internet and mobile technologies, in
transforming the Government of Cameroon to be perceived as open, inclusive, friendly, efficient and effective by its
people, businesses and international community, by providing accessible information and services that meet the
socio-economic, environmental and political needs of all stakeholders including public servants
The transformation of Cameroon through ICT is justified in the National Policy document for the Development of
Information and Communication Technologies.
There are a number of ongoing initiatives aiming the modernization of the public administration;
Stronger coordination and integration between these initiatives is needed
The EGOV.CM program aims at providing the foundation for the integration of existing and planned e-
governance initiatives in Cameroon.
 EGOV.CM s vision defines an implementation strategy and a concrete government program, through a
participatory and inclusive approach, towards the development of Electronic Governance in Cameroon.

2. Research Method

This topic actually inspired me because the few times I have accessed some government websites in Cameroon I
was not satisfy been a visitor to the site and also with some skills of a web developer I thought will I should try and
examine some of this websites to clearly see how its statistics looks like. This means here that using a tool which is
online I was able to flushed in some URLs of some ministries and the tool is capable of detecting the code quality
on the website, meta data, social media pages presence, and many other things which a cool website should have and
also all this is what makes a visitor after visiting a website will always want to come back but if the look and feel of
some of these sites are not that cool obviously we understand that the technology behind is not a good one and all
these affects the rate a which people visit the site.

This is the link of the web tool I used to come out with the statistics as seen in table 1 of this paper below
http://nibbler.silktide.com/en_US/ and just to expatiate this the screenshot below is the statistics/report for the
website of the Presidency of the Republic of Cameroon which corresponds to this link
http://nibbler.silktide.com/en_US/reports/www.prc.cm
3. Finding and Implications

Out of the forty-one Ministries that exist in Cameroon, most of then have a website while some does not have or is
still under construction. Also some of the websites are visited are not secured to carry out online transactions and
also the presence on social media is not that applicable. As a recap I was able to carry out statistics on some websites
of some of the core ministries thanks to an online tool or web application.
As mentioned in the previous section I wanted to actually use that website and create the statistics you see on the
table below. So I had to use each link of the seven ministries I tested and passed into that tool and record the statistics
somewhere and later on rearranged in on a spreadsheet to make it look somehow presentable. Even though I love
graphics format that is generating bar charts and histograms
because of time constraints I limited my self to the spreadsheet than going into complex graphics analysis. The table
below illustrate more information about my findings;
 Ministries in Cameroon with their Websites

Ministry of Agriculture Ministry of Basic Ministry of Higher Presidency of the Republic of

Ministry of Justice Ministry of External Affairs & Rural Development Ministry of Commerce Education Education Cameroon

Characteristics www.miniustice.eov www.diDlocam.cm www.minader.cm www.mincommerce.eov.cm www.minedub.cm www.minesuD.eov.cm www.Drc.cm

Accessibility 5.8 5.0 5.4 4.7 5.9 7.1

6.2
Experience 4.8 5.3 4.8 4.5 4.9 5.3 9.1

Marketing 5.1 5.8 4.9 4.8 3.4 6.9 9.6

Technology 4.8 5.8 4.2 3.9 4.5 4.8 6.2

Facebook page 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 7.4 10

Twitter 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0 9.9

Analytics 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 2.0 10

Printability 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0 10

Code quality 1.5 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.4 1.1

URL format 2.4 10.0 5.2 3.6 4.0 4.0 10

Mobile 3.0 1.8 2.6 2.6 3.0 4.4 8.2

Popularity 4.8 5.4 6.3 5.8 5.9 7.7 9.4

Social interest 5.4 5.1 4.6 5.6 1.9 8.1 9.2

Headings 6.0 3.0 5.0 3.0 10 6.9 4.8

Amount of content 8.7 9.0 7.3 7.7 8.4 8.5 9.2

Images 8.8 9.5 7.8 8.8 8.0 10 9.7

Internal links 9.9 9.0 10 7.9 9.6 7.9 9.9

Meta tags 10 10 2.0 2.0 2.0 8.4 10

Page titles 10 10 10 10 10 10 10

Incoming links 10 10 10 10 5.3 10 10

Freshness 10 10 10 10 10 3.1 10
Overall 5.8 | 5.8 5.5 4.9 5.1
6.0

____
Table 1: Websites statistics of ministries in Cameroon.
Li __ 1

As a Critical remark, it's clear that most of these websites are not developed professionally reason why the code
quality is actually below two on ten for all of them and also the absence of social media most of them do not even
have a Facebook or twitter page.

I have to also acknowledge here that in addition to the above personal work upon reading a research work
done with a similar topic but for the case of India which according to (DINESH KATRE, 2012) he mention some
parameters also used in evaluating usability of the 28 state government portals in India and the table below is the
result of the accessibility parameters that is been considered:

1. Site map / ToC of website / Description on how the website is arranged

2. Information in English

3. Keyword Search

4. Use of alternative text for images

5. Font size adjustment for readability

6. Local language website

7. Unicode or true type fonts

8. Appropriate Page Titles

9. Declaration of recommended browser

10. Declaration of recommended specific display resolution

11. Page Alignment in Browser 12. Scalable or fixed layout 13. Management of URLs opened as new browser
window / sessions

14. Visible link to return on homepage

15. Indicate Doc or PDF or images if linked as download

16. Use of bookmarks for long text

17. RSS feeds

18. Meta tags

I believe if all the above points really could be implemented professionally and tested then our government websites
could be looking great and having very cool features on it thereby making citizens to always feel comfortable why
visiting the website and why not even provide support assistance in such a way that if a visitor is on the site someone
attains to him/her.
Reflecting this researchers work to the case of Cameroon I believe I should lay emphasis on point six which talks
about Local language website (also known as Internationalization in professional milieu) which is the languages
available on the website; we all know that Cameroon is a bilingual country and so English and French are the two
official languages used so in other words any government websites produced to serve the citizens should fully provide
content in both languages under normal circumstances and Not what I have been seeing which seems like French is
the only official language In Cameroon which I really condemn that because every citizen be it English speaking or
French speaking should enjoy the same service and so the two languages should be equal.
4. Recommendation

As early stated in the abstract section of this paper it will be of great Importance for the Cameroon
government to establish a full flesh framework for implementation of e-government so that citizens will also
have to abide by the rules and regulations governing this implementation and monitored by ANTIC. Also
personally I believe its time for Cameroon government to start thinking of putting in place industries which
could even produced these computers that are been imported each and every day of which if for instance instead
of importing 500,000 computers from china we could used that money and create one here in Cameroon and
in this respect surely citizens could easily afford a computer and to better use the e-government system in place,
because one thing is sure you cant used a system well or even learn how to used it well if you dont have the
minimum prerequisite to access the system.

5. Conclusion

This research work has permit to lay hand on some vital information which up to this stage I was ignorant
of and also it help me realized what other people have written and contributed in as much as e-government is
concerned for the case of Cameroon and also through this very medium or paper I will have put into one place
some facts concerning the government websites owned by Cameroon ministries, that is their poor or non-
professional design which obviously does not encourage many visitors (citizens among others) to get in touch
with and I also realize that most of this websites are not Mobile Friendly and which is a very crucial error
because we all know that the world is going mobile and so what ever website or web application we are
developing and putting it online should be cross-platform and mobile friendly because many users might
obviously access the website using their mobile smart phones or devices especially that most of the time people
dont move along with computers but always with their phones or tablets and so if a websites is not responsive
this implies first you restrict your visitors to a particular group of people using pcs.
Haven mentioned this if we define e-government as the use of IT as the major driving force to re-engineer
and rapidly transform governance to interface with the needs of its citizens by establishing transparency at
national and local government levels we also believe this could not be effectively done if at every stage
monitoring and evaluation is not done and quality of service (QoS) been measured to make sure that what ever
product or service that is delivered in this respect meets certain norms and criterias. So, because if quality of
service was a priority we couldnt have crap websites representing our government institutions as seen in the
statistics publish above.
in other to put a cap on this research paper I will say that Cameroon is not that doing well in as much as the
implementation of e-government is concern but also believe strategies are put into place to re-enforced this so
that by the year 2035 which Cameroon is hoping to become an emerging nation, E-government should be fully
implemented and citizens enjoying services through this system.
References

Asogwa, B. E. (2011). The state of e-government readiness in Africa: A comparative web assessment of selected
African countries. Journal of Internet and Information Systems , 2(3), 43-57.
DINESH KATRE, M. G. (2012, 2 2). EXPERT USABILITY EVALUATION OF 28 STATE GOVERNMENT WEB
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http://www.ijpis.net/ojs/index.php/IJPIS/article/download/89/84
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NOVEMBER 2014 ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF E-GOVERNMENT IN CAMEROON. Yaounde: Prime
Ministers Office.
Nations, U. (2014). United Nations E-Government Survey 2014: E-Government for the future we want. United
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United Nations. (2010, 2 2). United Nations E-Government Survey 2010. Retrieved 1 28, 2017, from Public
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https://publicadministration.un.org/egovkb/Portals/egovkb/Documents/un/2010-Survey/Chapter-4-World-e-
government-rankings.pdf