## 7 Conclusions, Limitations, and Future Research Directions  
This study establishes a validated measurement scale to examine the challenging factors influencing government intention to adopt cloud services. It explains the intricate relationship between these factors in advancing government developmental purposes. These findings answer the research question with clarity and depth while demonstrating how cloud adoption in government settings can serve as a catalyst for socioeconomic development. The measurement items recorded strong factor loadings with a total variance of 70.079% explained, demonstrating the reliability and accuracy of the scale in evaluating the government's intention to adopt cloud services as development enablers. The high coefficient of reliability (between 0.807 and 0.950) confirms the measurement scale's appropriateness for examining the identified challenging factors in development-oriented cloud adoption decisions. Therefore, contributes to the IT for development field in several significant ways. First, it provides empirically validated constructs that connect technological (cloud computing) adoption decisions to development outcomes through government service delivery. Second, it highlights how barriers to cloud adoption, such as information security concerns, privacy considerations, and governance frameworks, could motivate governments' hesitation to embrace cloud-enabled development pathways without explicit assurances regarding data sovereignty and citizen privacy protection. Third, it demonstrates how performance expectancy in development contexts is closely tied to technology's perceived benefits of cloud services, such as efficiency, cost reduction, and service improvement, which can drive transformative changes to how governments deliver essential services to citizens, particularly in resource-constrained and secure and trusted environments. The research offers practical guidance on navigating cloud adoption challenges and how government and industry practitioners can more effectively leverage cloud technologies to drive innovation, enhance service delivery, improve resource allocation efficiency, and ultimately accelerate development outcomes. Future research could explore how these identified factors manifest across different government development concepts and regions. By building on these validated measurement scales, the IT for development community can further enhance our understanding of how cloud and other emerging technologies can be effectively leveraged to address persistent IT development challenges through improved government service delivery in the digital transformation age. Though the study successfully identified and validated the challenging factors influencing government cloud adoption, its scope is limited to a specific region and organisational context. Future research could explore the applicability of this measurement scale in diverse contexts, including private sector organisations or across different countries. In our future study, the validated measurement instrument will be used to gather responses for further analysis to test the hypotheses and discuss the overall impact of the conceptual model on the research. We acknowledge that while the findings of the current research may seem exclusive to Nigeria, the findings may benefit other developing countries with similar governance structures, regulatory environments, and technological infrastructure. Our research employed cross-sectional data to capture the perceptions of our targeted population. While we acknowledge that cross-sectional data cannot capture changes over time, we recommend that future research could explore longitudinal approaches or comparative studies across different regions to provide a more nuanced understanding. Conceptualisation, N.U. ; Methodology, N.U. ; Validation, N.U. ; Formal analysis, N.U., J.A.G. and K.P. ; Investigation, N.U. ; Data curation, N.U. ; Writing--original draft, N.U. ; Writing--review & editing, N.U., J.A.G., K.P. and U.C.O. ; Supervision, J.A.G. and K.P.