C-gov: E-gov services on the cloud for african rural communities

E-Government (e-gov) contributes to social development by easing access to governmental services. However, the deployment of an e-gov IT infrastructure, though relatively affordable, is still out of reach in most African rural communities. Cloud computing is emerging as a new paradigm that provides computing as a utility, and requires minimum investment in terms of IT infrastructure. Thus, it presents a promising opportunity for boosting e-gov services and reducing the digital-divide in developing countries, especially in Africa. In this paper, we present the different aspects related to deploying e-gov services into the cloud. We basically represent the most suitable deployment model, and delineate a roadmap for deploying a prototypical private cloud that can initially offer e-gov services to community areas (e.g., rural communities), and then grow on towards spreading over whole countries, or even the whole continent. As a proof of concept, we present the deployment of a prototypical embryonic e-Gov service, deployed on a private academia cloud that has been deployed in Morocco.