Assessing the Effectiveness of E-Governance in Public Service Delivery: A Comparative Study of Digitization Efforts in Rwanda, Kenya, and Ghana

Abstract: Purpose — Despite an explosion of African e‑governance investments, little cross‑country evidence shows how technology is converted into broad‑based public value. This study interrogates Rwanda’s Irembo, Kenya’s eCitizen and Ghana.gov portals to explain why superficially similar platforms achieve markedly different results. Design/methodology/approach — A multi‑scalar lens fusing New Public Management, UTAUT2 and Institutional Theory frames a qualitative‑dominant comparative case study. We triangulate 98 policy documents, UN EGDI and World‑Bank GovTech indices, Afrobarometer micro‑surveys and transaction‑level records. The data are subjected to thematic coding (κ = 0.78) and a cross‑case heat‑map matrix that traces causal pathways from policy design through platform accessibility and user trust to service outcomes. Findings — Top‑down institutional coercion enabled Rwanda to digitise 98 services and drive petty‑bribery prevalence from 23.9 % to 2.1 %, yet gains plateau once internet penetration drops below roughly 40 %. Kenya’s hybrid eCitizen–Huduma model, anchored in ubiquitous mobile‑money payments, converted 5 000 + services into 12 million active users and a reported 300 % revenue surge, though county‑level fragmentation still limits rural inclusion. Ghana’s PPP‑based Ghana.gov added 592 000 new taxpayers and cut business‑registration times from weeks to three days, but user trust and system interoperability remain uneven. Across cases, platform accessibility and citizen trust consistently mediate—and occasionally override—the hardware advantage of telecom infrastructure. Research limitations/implications — Reliance on secondary sources invites self‑report bias; future mixed‑methods work should pair transaction logs with ethnographic observation to capture lived user experience. Originality/value — We advance a policy–platform–trust–outcome framework that is the first empirically grounded tool for evaluating Global‑South e‑governance, and refine multi‑level governance theory by showing institutional coercion can offset infrastructural deficits only to a definable threshold.