Enhancing service delivery in Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) Nigeria: The imperative of e-governance

Abstract

Introduction The use of e-governance among many countries of the world is premised on its perceived capabilities to facilitate efficient service delivery to the public. The primary benefits of e-governance include efficiency and its capabilities to reduce corruption through automation. InfoDev and the Center for Democracy and Technology (2002) stated that e-governance has the potential to reduce income disparities between countries as well as to promote tourism among other national benefits (Awoleye 2008, Olaitan 2015). The realisation of the potential of information and communication technology (ICT) and, by extension, e-governance towards empowering the citizenry and improving public service delivery in this digital age led to the formulation of the national policy on information technology in 2001 by the General Olusegun Obasanjo-led Federal Government of Nigeria (Awoleye 2008). The policy details the roadmap for achieving ICT capabilities in the country by 2005 (Face, 2007, 2005, Chukwuemeka et al 2017). As a sequel to the above, a formal focus on e-governance as a means of improving public service delivery could be said to have existed for at least one and a half decades and its appraisal is necessary with a view to understanding its impact on public service delivery in the country. To this end, this study is aimed at assessing e-governance and public service delivery using the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) as a case study. Moreover, the printing of examination slips, the checking of results that often involved long distance travelling with its associated risks, checking of admission status and printing of admission letters can now be easily done in the confines of a candidate's room on the JAMB portal. This eliminates unnecessary travelling, queuing and exposure of adolescents that dominate candidacy of JAMB examination to undue risks. This was not so in the past when all these services were enjoyed only by visiting a designated JAMB office. The adoption of e-governance in the internal operations of the organisation, however, remains unclear to the public and also has not yet been empirically studied (to the best of the knowledge Background: Public service delivery in Nigeria is characterised by inefficiency. To address this administrative imbalance, various government organisations in Nigeria adopted e-governance to improve performance and service delivery.