E-government: the state at your fingertips, or not quite yet

Digital government promises a state that is faster, more transparent and closer to its citizens, a state quite literally at your fingertips. In West Africa, that promise remains largely unfulfilled. In 2024, not one of the nine countries in the zone under study reaches the global average of the UN E-Government Development Index (EGDI), set at 0.6382. The regional front-runner, Ghana, comes close at 0.632 but still ranks 108th out of 193 states. At the other end, Niger tops out at 0.212, a third of the global average. The divide is no longer an intuition: it can be quantified, and it comes at a cost. Yet the one-to-three ratio separating Ghana from Niger tells less a story of resources than a story of choices, since these two states share the same region, comparable budget constraints and the same starting lag.

A region lagging behind, on a continent already outpaced

The starting point is stark. In 2024, Africa remains the least advanced continent in the world in digital government, with a continental EGDI average of 0.4247, far behind Europe (0.8493) and Asia (0.6990). Of 54 African countries, only eight exceed the global average, and they all lie in the north or the south of the continent: South Africa, Mauritius, Tunisia, Morocco, Seychelles and Egypt at the top. No continental West African country appears among them. The region is therefore not only behind the world, it is also behind its own continent. This twofold distance is not just one data point among many: it is the measure of what separates West African citizens from a state that answers, informs and accounts for itself online.

The EGDI, published every two years by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), is not a mood barometer. It combines, in equal parts, three pillars: the breadth and quality of online public services (OSI), the robustness of telecom infrastructure (TII) and human capital (HCI), that is, the population's ability to use these services. A single score sums up these three dimensions on a scale from 0 to 1. It is an instrument that is comparable over time and across countries, and it is precisely this comparability that makes the West African divide legible.

Three profiles, three different bottlenecks

A single overall score hides what matters most: each country is held back by a different pillar. Comparing Ghana, Senegal and Mali, the three most revealing profiles in the region, dispels the illusion of a uniform lag. Ghana advances on all three fronts at once, with solid online services (OSI 0.608), sound infrastructure (TII 0.728) and human capital that keeps pace (HCI 0.559). Senegal, by contrast, shows a disjointed profile: world-class infrastructure (TII 0.733, the best in the zone) but human capital half as strong (HCI 0.338). Mali, finally, accumulates lags, with a collapsed human capital (HCI 0.125, the regional floor) that drags the entire index down.

The practical consequence is decisive. The same euro of cooperation does not produce the same effect from one country to the next: building an additional services portal in Senegal, whose infrastructure is already excellent, unlocks nothing if citizens do not know how to use it; the same euro invested in digital literacy and the training of public officials would deliver a far higher return there. In Mali, conversely, no portal will compensate for a human capital at 0.125. Steering digital government by the overall score is to advance blind; steering it by the limiting pillar is to target spending where it truly unlocks the chain.

The pipes arrive faster than the ability of administrations and citizens to use them. Building portals without investing in skills means funding services that few people know how or are able to use.

The regional weak link: human capital

If we look for the bottleneck common to the region, it has a name: human capital. Infrastructure is advancing fast, driven by falling mobile data costs and the arrival of fibre. Senegal reaches 0.733 on this pillar, a level that upper-middle-income countries would not disown. But the capacity of populations and administrations to make use of these networks lags almost everywhere, with an HCI of 0.125 in Mali and 0.167 in Burkina Faso. In other words, the region is laying rails faster than it is training drivers. This imbalance is the central lesson of the 2024 edition for West Africa: the bottleneck has shifted from the technical to the human.

This diagnosis has immediate budgetary implications. Infrastructure spending is visible, measurable and politically attractive: you inaugurate a data centre, you announce a portal. Human capital spending, by contrast, is diffuse, slow to bear fruit and rarely celebrated, digital literacy, continuous training of officials, support for users. Yet that is where the return on West African e-government is now decided. A portal without trained users is an immobilised investment; a trained official without a modern portal remains more useful than a modern portal without a trained official. Bénin is no exception: its online services (OSI 0.520) outpace its infrastructure (0.482), which in turn is ahead of its human capital (0.371), the pillar called upon to carry the next step of its catch-up.

The gap with the world, in one picture

Measuring the divide requires a reference point. The global EGDI average for 2024 (0.6382) provides one, objective and common to all. Measured against this threshold, West African countries line up beneath a single line: Ghana grazes it at 0.632, but no other crosses it. The African continental average (0.4247) slots in between Bénin and Togo, a reminder that the entire continent remains below the global threshold. The distance is no trifle: Niger, at 0.212, stands at a third of the global average, which represents not a slight gap but a technological generation gulf.

Twenty years of progress: the divide is not destiny

The 2024 snapshot might be discouraging; the film of the past twenty years tells the opposite story. Ghana rose from an EGDI of 0.241 in 2003 to 0.632 in 2024, settling durably above its neighbours from 2018 onward. Senegal doubled its index over the same period, from 0.201 to 0.516, with a marked acceleration after 2019. Bénin, starting from a comparable level in 2003 (0.235), went through a decade of stagnation, even decline, until 2016, before a spectacular recovery that carried it from 0.204 in 2016 to 0.458 in 2024. The lesson is identical to that of agricultural yields: what sets these trajectories apart is not geography, but the consistency and targeting of public effort.

The case of Côte d'Ivoire is the most telling in the region: its EGDI doubled in six years, rising from 0.278 in 2018 to 0.559 in 2024, the fastest catch-up trajectory in the continental zone. This leap owes nothing to a miracle and everything to a sustained political commitment to digitising public services and extending network coverage. It demonstrates that a country can, if it so decides, halve its gap with the world in a single legislature. The administrative digital divide is therefore not a state of nature: it is a provisional balance, one that widens or closes according to the choices made.

What citizens can really do online

Behind the indices lies a concrete question: what can a citizen actually accomplish in front of the screen? The Online Service Index (OSI) approaches this reality by measuring the breadth of available procedures, from consulting information to completing a full transaction (paying a tax, obtaining a certificate, registering). On this ground, the regional ranking tightens at the top: Ghana leads at 0.608, followed closely by Nigeria (0.537), Côte d'Ivoire (0.522) and Bénin (0.520), the latter rising to fourth in the region, ahead of Senegal. The gap between the best-equipped and Niger (0.308) remains clear, but it is narrower than on the overall index, a sign that several states have managed to deploy services even where their infrastructure or human capital lagged behind.

This tightening yields an important lesson: the supply of services is advancing faster than the ability to use it. In other words, the technical deployment of online procedures is no longer, for the countries at the top of the ranking, the main obstacle. Bénin's challenge, in particular, is no longer so much to create services as to make them accessible and effectively used by the greatest number, which points once again to human capital and Internet access.

The invisible foundation: no connected users, no e-government

An online public service truly exists only if citizens can reach it. Yet Internet access remains highly unequal across the region and progresses at diverging rates. In Bénin, the share of the population using the Internet rose from 11.3 % in 2015 to 32.4 % in 2023, nearly tripling in eight years, but still leaving two-thirds of the country offline. Senegal, starting from higher ground, crossed the symbolic threshold of a connected majority to reach 60 % in 2023. Burkina Faso, by contrast, remains at 25.4 %, still lagging despite a marked recent acceleration. These curves trace the glass ceiling of e-government: no portal, however well designed, can serve a population that cannot access it.

This foundation of access recalls a truth too often forgotten in digitisation strategies: connectivity is not coverage. A network can cover a territory without the population using it, for lack of an affordable device, an accessible plan or the necessary skill. This is the thread that links the three EGDI pillars: infrastructure creates the possibility, human capital creates the capacity, services create the reason. Breaking a single one of these links is enough to immobilise the whole.

The cost of staying offline

A state that stays offline does not merely miss out on modernity: it pays a real price, every year. Digital government increases fiscal efficiency, because a tax that can be declared and paid online is collected better and at lower cost than a counter tax. It strengthens transparency, because a paperless procedure leaves a trace, reducing opaque circuits and informal fees. And it brings the state closer to its most remote citizens, those for whom every procedure today requires a costly trip to a regional capital. Conversely, inaction is paid for in uncollected revenue, in facilitated corruption and in services inaccessible to part of the population.

The most insidious waste, however, is internal. The gaps in sub-indices show that building portals without investing in digital skills produces services that few people know how or are able to use, wasting the infrastructure investment already made. A data centre inaugurated but underused, a portal launched but deserted, a database built but never queried: these are the silent costs of a digitisation that advances through announcements rather than through usage. The cost of inaction is therefore not only that of services not delivered, it is also that of investments already made that yield nothing.

What averages hide

The aggregate statistic is useful for comparison, dangerous for decision-making. The African continental average of 0.4247, which slots in between Bénin and Togo in the regional ranking, masks a gap of more than double between Ghana (0.632) and Niger (0.212): two realities that nothing brings together, united under a single figure. More subtly still, a single national EGDI score conceals the internal disjunction of the pillars. Senegal, with its world-class infrastructure and its human capital half as strong, is the perfect illustration: its overall score of 0.516 says nothing about the pillar that truly holds it back. Deciding on the basis of the overall score means risking investment where the effect is nil while neglecting the true bottleneck.

These international indices, however valuable, moreover stop at national borders. They say nothing of the gaps between the capital and the hinterland, between men and women in access to digital tools, between connected urban youth and offline rural elders. Yet it is precisely at this sub-national scale that real inclusion is decided. A country may post a respectable OSI while leaving entire regions without practical access to the services it lists. The national average, like the continental average, hides what one needs to see in order to act.

A single EGDI score conceals which pillar truly holds each country back. Measuring the limiting pillar, country by country, turns a ranking into an investment roadmap.

The CRAD angle: from overall score to limiting pillar

CRAD reads these indices not as a league table but as a diagnosis to be refined. Our conviction is simple: the value of an e-government data point lies in its granularity. The overall score serves to situate a country in the world; it does not serve to decide where to invest. For that, one must descend to the limiting pillar, then further still, down to real usage measured in the field, the skills actually available within administrations, the concrete obstacles encountered by users. It is this work of disaggregation that links international data to operational decisions.

Our added value is precisely to link field data, namely real usage, skills and obstacles, to the dashboards of donors, in order to target investment where it unlocks the chain, from human capital to services actually adopted. Concretely, this requires geolocated usage surveys, measurements disaggregated by sex and by territory, and digital data collection repeated over time to track adoption rather than mere deployment. This is the difference between counting the portals opened and measuring the procedures actually completed. A digital administration is not steered by what it offers, but by what its citizens make of it.

• Measure usage, not just supply. The number of online services says nothing about their adoption. Tracking actual take-up rates, procedure by procedure, reveals the deserted portals and the unmet needs.
• Disaggregate by territory and by sex. National averages mask internal divides. Mapping access and usage at the regional scale and by gender is the precondition for effective digital inclusion.
• Target the limiting pillar. Investing in infrastructure when human capital is the bottleneck amounts to wasting the spending. Diagnosis by pillar directs every euro to where it produces the greatest effect.

Bénin's catch-up, to be consolidated

Bénin holds an instructive position. Its EGDI jumped 40 % between 2018 (0.326) and 2024 (0.458), one of the most sustained gains in the region, driven by an online services offer now ranked fourth regionally (OSI 0.520). The country has thus succeeded in the first half of the journey: deploying digital procedures. What remains is the second, the more demanding half: making them accessible and effectively used, while two-thirds of the population remain offline (32.4 % of Internet users in 2023) and human capital remains the weakest pillar (HCI 0.371).

This final quarter of the gap will not be closed with the same levers as the first three. Opening new services yields diminishing returns when infrastructure and skills plateau. Bénin's next step will be played out on the terrain of inclusion: affordable connectivity, digital literacy, user support and the training of officials. It is less spectacular work than the inauguration of a portal, but it is what turns a score into a service delivered.

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