From E-Government to Good Governance and from Good Governance to Development... The Arab world in the global E-Government readiness report 2005 Arab E-government

Text of report by Hugh Naylor, "Ministry launches e-government project, published in English by Jordan Times website on 20 November

The government formally inaugurated its long-awaited e- government programme yesterday with the intention of streamlining bureaucracy and enhancing access to the internet in rural areas.

In front of an audience at the Royal Scientific Society, Minister of Information and Communications Technology Omar Kurdi said the e- government website would eventually act as a one-stop gateway to the government.

"We will soon be able to provide citizens and businesses will all government-related information without having to switch from one website to another."

The programme, which is slated to cost JD45m until its scheduled completion in 2009, seeks to improve communication between ministries, citizens and businesses by offering internet browsers quick access to information.

"People won't have to go to two or three ministries in a single day to get their passports renewed - they can just go online, fill out a form, and the ministries will do the rest. E-government will be citizen-centric and will save all of us time and money," he said.

"At the end of the day," explained Kurdi, "we're looking for e- government to act as a mechanism for public sector reform."

The ministry is pushing for e-government to serve as a tool to expand greater internet access to rural communities. As part of the ambitious programme, the ministry plans to install 5,000km of fibre optic cables, expand broadband internet access to 3,200 public schools, 23 community colleges and roughly 120 internet knowledge stations by the end of this year.

Hasan Hourani, director of the e-government programme, said the ministry has begun training 8,000 government employees and managers of the country's knowledge stations in how to navigate the e- government project's website.

"Internet technology has only modestly penetrated Jordan," he told The Jordan Times, "but our training courses and programmes will help change mindsets and get more people familiar with this technology."

Internet penetration in Jordan currently stands at around 7.5 per cent out of which three per cent are paying subscribers.

But trimming down bureaucracy and increasing greater internet usage, according to observers, will require more than just a transition to a stronger reliance on internet technology. "There is no substitute for good management," said economist Yusuf Mansour, adding that dependence on internet technology alone won't fix deeper structural problems in the government. "Changing the country's mindset is the most important thing - not hardware and software. This can be done with good and consistent management," he said. "But there is a need for the government to push for information technology adoption," he added.

Mansour also said that a constant reshuffling of cabinets and changes in ministerial posts could derail the e-government's management progress, setting back its full implementation.

Mohammad Masri of the University of Jordan's Centre for Strategic Studies, however, said there are serious flaws in the way the ministry went about preparing Jordan for its impending transition to e-government.

"If you ask people in the street about it, they simply don't know what e-government is," he said. "The government should have had a better strategy that informed and prepared people of the programme, which would have made it more effective from the start."

He commented that the ministry should have implemented a gradual, grass-roots and community-based approach to further awareness of information technology to rural areas.

"People in rural areas are used to seeing their documents and papers stamped in front of them. Making transactions over the internet is a completely foreign concept for them, and changing their ideas will take a lot of work."

If internet penetration doesn't proceed fast enough, Masri said he believed "e-government could become just a tool of elites."

But Musa Shteiwi, a sociologist at the University of Jordan, believes that if Jordan wants to enter the information technology age, a considerable effort must be made by the government. "How do you become an internet culture without rapidly promoting internet technology?" he said. "Jordan has a lot of potential to develop an internet culture."

Shteiwi said, however, that the government must be committed to keep positive momentum going. "It would be a waste if they [the government] got sidetracked; they must continue promoting these changes in a progressive way."

(c) 2006 BBC Monitoring Middle East. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.