Monday, April 7, 2014

Can E- Governance Reduce Corruption?

By: Haidy Abdrabou, Nouri Hassabalh and Mohamed Soliman.  
 Cairo, Egypt--On Sunday April 2nd , 2014, at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Dr.  Shahjahan Bhuiyan, professor at School of Global Affairs and Public Policy in AUC talked about E-governance, how it functions and how successful it is in many developing countries like Kazakhstan and others.

Dr. Bhuiyan talked about e-governance, he mentioned that it is one of the "ambitious projects" in the developing countries. He talked about it in a way of the vending machine theory, which is providing services for the people. The need of e-governance in order to provide the customer, it works by customer focused effect, easy to use services for citizens and businesses. One of many pros of e-governance were it would reduce financial crises, as it would save a lot of money for governments to take care of other problems.

One prominent problem was corruption, e-governance reduces corruption. E-governance is all about the technology and internet connections, it reduces human contact, so as a result it would reduce many forms of corruptions for instance bribes, blackmailing and other problems. Corruption kills the capacities for governments to work and function.  E- Governance would make everything easier for the citizens; it has been applied in many countries like, India and Kazakhstan.

Most people have access to all of the information; this means people would be aware of what their governments are doing, throughout the lecture Dr. Bhuiyan showed many statistics about how successful e-governance in India since 2008, till 2013, and it showed a huge decrease in the index of minimizing the corruption phenomena.

During the interview, Dr. Bhuiyan mentioned that e-governance in Egypt was working, before the January 25th revolution, adding it to the list of countries that, he discussed in the lecture, which were India, Kazakhstan and Pakistan. It was working well, but people could not feel it from the amounts of corruption that was existing during that time. As people of Egypt didn't have the access to all of the information and that most of it were falsified, in a way, they were not reflecting the truth.
Lastly, Dr. Bhuiyan added that, e-governance won’t work out unless, the society demands it, as it has to be the people's wish to have a system like this, “civil society have to be empowered to make such system accountable.” One of the attendees, Dr. Khaled Abdelhalim, assistant professor of Urban policy, PPAD. He added in his interview that e-governance would only be efficient, when there is "public awareness and societal will."

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