Literature has suggested that Malawians are keen to participate. Malawian’s willingness to participate is evident as the country has recorded high voter turnouts during the elections in recent decades. However, literature also suggests that there is minimal citizen engagement in between elections. Elsewhere, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been used to enhance citizen engagement, but ICT led citizen engagement is still an emerging field and yet to be explored as an area of research particularly in Malawi. We thus sought to explore if the use of ICTs could improve citizen engagement with councils, councilors, and utility companies that provide water and electricity in Malawi. We developed and deployed an ICT platform called Mzinda which means My location in Malawi’s populous Chichewa language. The platform provided various channels for citizens and duty bearers to engage via SMS, USSD, web and a mobile application. We sought to understand the factors that influence citizen’s behavior intention to use an ICT platform to engage. We applied the modified UTAUT model by including Attitude and Self Efficacy social constructs that have among others been cited as limitations of the UTAUT model. We conducted factor loadings of six social constructs of the modified UTAUT model to validate content and reexamine the model in the context of citizen engagement using ICTs in Malawi. We found that, Attitude and Self Efficacy were not significant determinants of the Behaviour Intention for citizens to use the ICT platform. However, 75% of the Behaviour Intention was influenced by Perfomance Expectancy and Effort Expectancy as moderated by age and gender. Empirical evidence showed that responsiveness and actionability of councils and councillors had improved. We also learned that citizens believed that service delivery had improved and that they had more influence over councils, councillors, and the utility companies because of using the ICT platform. We conclude by noting that improvements in service delivery; enhanced responsiveness and actionability of councils, councillors and the utility companies were not necessarily as a result of the ICT platform alone; but a combination of ICTs and non-technology mechanisms of engaging the stakeholders through community campaigns, radio programs, print media engagement, community meetings and debates among others. It is evident that ICTs are not the panacea of all citizen engagement problems. This research can be useful to researchers and practitioners in the technology and citizen engagement domains.
Individual and group antecedents of satisfaction: One lab- multilevel study
