Few African governments offer a suite of online services for citizens. In fact, nearly one-third of African countries are in the bottom 10 percent of the world rankings. That, however, is changing, and there are dozens of successful African examples of e-government initiatives.

Nine recommendations to guide Africa’s ICT development include open data, more local content, infrastructure projects, and public-private partnerships.

New research conducted by World Wide Web Foundation and Open Data Institute finds African open data initiatives to have good intentions but limited reach and impact.

Six African programs the Open Development Technology Alliance has supported in the past two years include open data, mapping, a mobile survey, and a hackathon.

Now two years old, the Kenya Open Data Initiative has set a high standard for Open Data in Africa. The platform – the first of its kind in a developing country – has encouraged government transparency within Kenya and beyond.

Malawi’s first Data Literacy Bootcamp was recently held in Lilongwe. The aim was two-fold: to teach participants how to analyze data and then to have participants use this data to solve real issues and challenges.