A Tale of Two Continents: Contents of African and Asian E-Government Websites

The digital divide is often discussed from the perspective of North and South and haves and have-nots. This is true of comparative studies on information and communication technologies (ICTs) and e-government. As a result, there is less research on the South-South digital divide and/or cross-national comparative studies that focus mainly on developing countries. This paper addresses this gap by comparing contents of African and Asian e-government service websites. Based on analyses of 582 African and 939 Asian e-government service websites, we present comparisons of the contents of websites from the two continents with respect to the type of site, type of service, features, online executable services, level/stage of development of e-government service, and e-government index. Overall, e-government service websites from the two continents have similar contents, save a few differences.