Fighting Administrative Corruption with Digital Government in Sub-Saharan Africa

YELKAL MULUALEM WALLE; TOMASZ JANOWSKI; ELSA ESTEVEZ

Santiago de Compostela

Conferencia; 18th European Conference on Digital Government (ECDG 2018); 2018

Universidad de Santiago de Compostela

Administrative corruption is a pervasive problem and a major threat to economic and social development around the world, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa which lags behind other development regions in various development indicators and is seen as one of the most corrupt region globally. This paper examines a hypothesis that digital government ? the use of digital technology to transform public administration units and their relationships with citizens, businesses and each other ? helps reduce administrative corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa. To this end, the paper relates the United Nations e-Government Development Index (EDI) and the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index (CPI) for 45 Sub-Saharan African countries in the period from 2012 to 2016, performing linear regression with EDI as an independent variable and CPI as a dependent variable and with statistical controls showing how changes in the level of digital government can explain changes in the levels of administrative corruption. The estimation results show that the effects of the change in the digital government adoption on corruption reduction are statistically significant. The correlation is between two variables high and its regression R-squared value shows that more than 37% of the corruption reduction is due to digital government development in the region. Our findings suggest that the adoption of digital government has shown capacity for reducing administrative corruption for Sub-Saharan African countries. The paper further explores the nature of the relationship using the case of Ethiopia, which performance according to the EDI and CPI indexes improved slightly over the 2012-2016 period. As part of this case it examines: 219 electronic public services developed in Ethiopia since 2011, common applications such as e-procurement or e-tax systems that cut horizontally across different ministries, and the customer-centric strategy to conveniently deliver services and information to citizens. We also uncover conditions under which such initiatives can lead to reductions in the incidence of corruption, e.g. strengthening of law enforcement, high political will to fight corruption and strengthening of the anti-corruption institutions.