# **VII. Analysis Focused on Africa**

In this section, an additional Africa-focused analysis was conducted to test whether the adoption of digital GovTech platforms in an African context has an impact on citizen engagement. The sample includes 8 African countries having implemented digital GovTech platforms and 112 control countries without GovTech platforms. This choice was made to retain non-African countries without GovTech platforms in the control group to increase the number of observations. The entropy balancing was once again applied as identification strategy. According to the findings, the adoption of a GovTech platform translates into improved citizen engagement in Africa. For example, the positive and significant coefficient of the GovTech variable in the first column of Table 9 means that African countries having adopted digital platforms allowing citizen to participate in policy decision-making and provide feedback on public service delivery experience 0.13 points increase in citizen engagement. However, the results were not significant when using the 2021 citizen engagement data compared to those obtained when using the 2022 data. This suggests that there is a need for a diffusion time before observing the positive and significant impact of GovTech on citizen engagement through public deliberations. Also, the magnitude of the impact of GovTech is higher for the engaged society variable.

**Table 9: Results of the Analysis focused on Africa**

||**Civ**<br>**CSPI**|**il society par**<br>**(2021)**|**ticipation (C**<br>**CSPI**|**SPI)**<br>**(2022)**|**ES (20**|**Engaged**<br>**21)**|**society (ES)**<br>**ES (2**|**022)**|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||**(1)**|**(2)**|**(3)**|**(4)**|**(5)**|**(6)**|**(7)**|**(8)**|
|**GovTech**<br>**Africa**|**0.139****|**0.139*****|**0.137****|**0.137*****|**0.337**|**0.337**|**0.852*****|**0.852*****|
||**(0.0584)**|**(0.0465)**|**(0.0536)**|**(0.0442)**|**(0.253)**|**(0.224)**|**(0.225)**|**(0.185)**|
|Observations|84|84|84|84|84|84|84|84|
|R-squared|0.064|0.436|0.074|0.401|0.021|0.267|0.149|0.452|
|Covariates|No|Yes|No|Yes|No|Yes|No|Yes|
||||**Standa**<br>***** p<**|**rd errors in p**<br>**0.01, ** p<0.**|**arentheses**<br>**05, * p<0.1**||||

# **VIII. Conclusion and Recommendations**

Citizen engagement and participation play a pivotal role in ensuring accountability, improving public policy quality, and enhancing service delivery. The study’s results highlight a significant and positive impact of the implementation of GovTech platforms on citizen engagement. This robust finding holds across alternative data, identification strategies, and different rates of technology diffusion. Moreover, the study identifies democracy and the equal distribution of political power as strong, positive factors affecting citizen engagement, while public sector corruption negatively affects citizen participation. In terms of global application, GovTech platforms prove more effective in fostering citizen engagement in developed economies with efficient governments; low institutional and social fragility; and little to no conflict. An additional Africa-focused analysis reinforces the positive impact of digital platforms on citizen engagement in African countries. These results suggest that GovTech platforms hold the potential to enhance citizen engagement/participation, particularly in democratic, egalitarian societies, and lowcorruption contexts. However, the success of the GovTech reforms hinges on government effectiveness, 17