Technical Aspects of the Pages

The primary thing that I noticed about all the sites is that they mostly seem to be developed and hosted by private contracted entities for the government. Secondly there is at times a sense of unfinished-ness to them, with menus not completely populated, text that looks like it got copied and pasted out of some other document, and broken links. On the Ministry of Health page there are some tables of links that don’t even have a reference behind them, and on the Department of Immigration some of the main navigation bar links have dynamic titles that didn’t display properly in my browser. This could simply be a compatibility issue, but best practice would indicate a “best viewed with…” indication somewhere, which is lacking. The immigration site on the other hand does have the interesting aspect that it tracks the click-through to the page, that is it remembers in the effective URL the URL of the page where you were that linked to them. There are several domains like finance.gov.zm, education.gov.zm, and state.gov.zm that appear to be registered but with only blank pages. This may indicate that further development is on the way and more agencies plan to role out sites in the future.

Infrastructure Challenges

Real readiness for E-governance however requires more than simply pretty webpages with lots of documents available for download. The citizens must be able to actually get to the pages somehow. Given that Africa generally has the least developed telecomm infrastructure in the world, that could be a problem. [Coeur de Roy] Zambia does have full internet but internal networking may be a different story. In a 2002 paper I found analyzing ICT readiness in Africa it was said that Zambia had on the order of 6,500 dialup internet subscribers out of a population of over 8 million. [Mbarika] Also at that point there were only 3 cities with points-of-presence. This points to a serious access problem as far as Zambians actually getting to the agency websites. There seems to be good content out there, but who is actually able to see it? On the other hand that number of subscribers may skewed since it is reasonable to assume that a large portion of those would internet cafes or other public use systems, thus the one subscription actually could represent a large number of people having internet access available.