Authored by: Nuole (Lula) Chen (MIT GOV/LAB), Salim Kombo (Busara), Will Sullivan (MIT GOV/LAB)
The World Bank GovTech Maturity Index, which measures how countries are digitizing public services, ranks Kenya as highly mature, the third in a four step ranking system. Kenya is already known as a technology innovation hub, with the widespread use of mobile money (M-PESA) and eCitizen, a centralized service delivery platform where people can access government services online. Digitization is also now ramping up to include more online services from lower levels of government.
Increasing digital service use can be challenging in a low-trust context, and currently, trust in the government is low in Kenya. A 2023 survey found that only 43 percent of people trust the government. Factors including corruption, scandals, poor service delivery, and flawed elections have likely hurt trust in government. Recently, there have been nation-wide protests in Kenya against proposed tax increases, which evolved into a protest about the significant lack of trust that citizens have towards the government to efficiently manage taxes and a perception that the leadership of the government is out of touch with citizens’ demands.
The government now faces the challenges of convincing people to engage with their services in this low-trust environment. In a recent partnership, Busara and MIT Governance Lab (MIT GOV/LAB) conducted an online survey to investigate how the government might be able to build trust when collaborating on service delivery with a private partner. Particularly, we looked into the county government’s recent partnership with Safaricom, the largest telecommunications company in the country, to develop an online platform called My County Hub. The platform aims to provide citizens with online services, including requesting emergency services, paying for business permits and parking, and receiving information from the government.
Emphasizing partners’ role in projects may help service uptake but hurt trust in government
We asked more than 11,000 people in the Nairobi metro area about their trust in government. We then explained how one could access the My County Hub portal and what services it would provide. In an experimental design, participants were randomly told that either a partnership between the county government and Safaricom, the county government alone, or Safaricom alone was responsible for rolling out the portal.
Finally, the survey asked how likely people were to use the platform and how much they trusted the county government, and it gave them the option to see more information about My County Hub.
Our research found that study participants who were told that Safaricom alone was developing the platform were more interested in using the platform, but they expressed lower trust in county government. Meanwhile, people who were told the platform was a purely government product may have shown higher trust in the county government than those who were told it was a Safaricom product, but they had less interest in using the platform or hearing more about it.
While advertising something like this as a Safaricom project would help with uptake in the short term, it could harm the long term relationship between citizens and government.
People’s trust in Safaricom didn’t lead to more trust in government
We initially theorized that people who learned that the government was collaborating with a trusted company to deliver services would have increased levels of trust in government.
However, the results did not show that people who were told the platform was a private-public collaboration experienced higher trust in government compared to people who were told the platform was purely a public or purely a private enterprise. One reason that people’s trust in Safaricom may not have transferred to the government is because cases of trust transfer in research have often involved parties about which a truster did not have strong prior beliefs, unlike the government.
And the low trust in government in the Safaricom condition was driven by people who had low trust in government to begin with — in other words, people with low trust in government before they were told about My County Hub had even less trust in government afterwards. Similarly, people who had high trust in both the government and Safaricom to begin with had increased levels of trust after learning that the two groups were working together on the platform.
People who were told Safaricom was responsible for My County Hub and had low trust in government might think of Safaricom as replacing the government as service providers, indicating to them that the government is incapable of providing services. This is known as the substitution effect and could potentially contribute to a downward trend of trust.
This result could also be due to the possibility that people have more brand loyalty with Safaricom than with the government and therefore believe that the portal would inherently work better with Safaricom than if it were done by the government. More policy implications and details of the study results will be included in a forthcoming paper.
MIT GOV/LAB and Busara have collaborated on projects for a number of years. We co-led a course for graduate students in 2020 on conducting behavioral science research in the field. In the past couple of years, two researchers from Busara have joined MIT GOV/LAB as practitioners-in-residence. Scholars from the University of Nairobi, Busara, and MIT GOV/LAB have explored increased exchange between Global North and South scholars to produce more innovative research, and a 2022 Busara and MIT GOV/LAB case study looked at what messages and messengers best increase Covid-19 vaccine confidence and uptake.
