The United Nations has recently concluded an international benchmarking exercise aimed at measuring levels of e-governance among the 190 member countries. The newly released report puts the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the top league, among countries that have successfully introduced e-government.
The UN report, which used Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure as one of the parameters for awarding points, has also singled out the UAE as one of the global leaders in online access as 33 percent of its population has online connections.
Globally, the index has ranked the UAE as the first in the Arab World and 21st worldwide, giving it 2.17 points. This positions it ahead of Japan (2.12), Ireland (2.16), Austria (2.14) and Russia (1.89) and following closely behind Italy (2.21) and Luxembourg (2.20). The top five countries in the list include the US (3.11), Australia (2.60) and New Zealand (2.59). In the Middle East, the UAE is ranked at the top of the list, followed by Kuwait (2.12), Bahrain (2.04) and Lebanon (2.00).
The index was developed using three key parameters for awarding points: the country’s official online presence, telecommunications infrastructure and human development capacity. It also gave weight to the citizen-centric approach of e-Government initiatives. UAE figures among 36 countries that fall in the top-rung “High e-Government Capacity” in the score range of between 2.00 and 3.35. The other three categories used for the benchmarking exercise were Medium e-Government Capacity (1.60 to 1.99 points), Minimal e-Government Capacity (1.00 to 1.59 points) and Deficient e-Government Capacity (below 1.00 points).
“In just one year of full-fledged operations, Dubai e-Government has achieved dramatic progress and is now on the verge of launching its second phase which involves the gradual integration of Web services of the different government departments into a unified portal,” said Salem Al-Shair, Director e-Services, Dubai e-Government.
“Dubai e-Government was set up specifically to create a centralized automated platform to offer most government services online to the community, with a vision was to turn Dubai into a leading hub of the New Economy,” he added.
The UN Index has identified five stages of e-government while assessing the member countries: emerging presence, in which the country is committed to becoming an e-government player; enhanced presence, offering dynamic and specialized updated information, with sites linking other official pages; interactive presence, providing access to a wide range of government institutions and services, with capacity to search specialized databases and download/submit forms.
The transactional presence phase, offers secure transactions like obtaining visas, passports, birth and death records, licenses, permits, car registration fees, utility bills and taxes; and seamless integration, offering capacity to instantly access any service in a “unified package,” eliminating demarcation of ministerial/departmental/agency lines and clustering services along common needs.
While 17 highly developed countries figure in the transactional stage, no country has yet reached the ultimate seamless integration stage. — (menareport.com)
© 2002 Mena Report (www.menareport.com)
