Sustaining electronic governance programs in developing countries

This paper focuses on the challenge of sustaining Electronic Governance (EGOV) initiatives in developingcountries to ensure their real impact on the society. While the challenge is well-recognized in theinternational development community, there is little evidence of research that discusses this challengeand how it could be addressed. This paper attempts to fill this gap by presenting a comprehensiveapproach which directly addresses the sustainability issues as part of the EGOV development lifecycle,and demonstrates how this approach was applied in a real-life project context in Afghanistan, aimed ataddressing country-specific EGOV sustainability challenges. In view of this experience, the paper alsodiscusses the adequacy of the approach to meet a range of sustainability challenges, with concludingremarks to guide developing countries in their endeavors to sustain EGOV programs.