Promoting Transparency and Strengthening Public Trust in Government through Information Communication Technologies? A Study of Ghana's E-Governance Initiative

This paper attempts to examine Ghana's quest to use ICT as a tool to enhance transparency and build public trust in government. The questions the paper attempts to answer are: what are the main challenges confronting the government's e-governance initiative as a tool to ensure transparency and citizens' trust in the public sector? What steps are being taken to address these challenges? We argue that while Ghana seems to have made remarkable progress in this endeavour, it still faces a number of significant obstacles, which must be addressed if the objectives of its e-governance project are to be fully realized. Key challenges include infrastructure development for the growth of ICT, the huge gap in access to ICT (or what may be described as the digital divide), and the change in organizational culture to enhance easy accessibility to public documents.