Due to the high rate of e-government projects failures occurring in developing countries and
the researcher being from a developing country, an impetus to undertake this research was
provided. In IS research, diffusion of e-government products and services was noted to be
slow within developing countries, and most developing countries striving to adopt egovernment
have undertaken it under the heavy burden of gender inequalities and strong
multicultural beliefs. However, these social factors were shown to liberally influence users’
perception, which in turn influences users’ intentions and usage behaviour. Although there
has been much research to explain users’ perceptions, few have been conducted on egovernment
diffusion using developing country experiences. The identified gap prompted
this research to investigate how the citizens of a country ‘Nigeria’ receive information about
the egovernment products and services and how this information has influenced the way they
feel, form opinions and make judgments on egovernment products and services. Therefore,
the aim of this research is to examine the implication of culture and gender upon egovernment
diffusion within Nigeria. For this purpose, a conceptual model was formed
combining social interaction, trust of egovernment delivery personnel and constructs from
Roger’s theory of diffusion and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to study egovernment
diffusion from the citizens’ perspective. Additionally, the culture and gender
elements were considered. In turn, these elements were expected to determine and explain
predictor constructs that would be used to explain, determine and predict citizen’s acceptance
of e-government products and services. To acquire the data to this research, a qualitative
research approach involving the case study method was employed. The data collection
techniques used included interviews, personal observations, and examination of archival
documents. The three main indigenous communities of Nigeria Yoruba, Ibo and Hausa were
used and cross case analysis employed. This led to the findings identifying social interaction
and the trust of personnel providing egovernment as the novel parts of the framework for this
research. The main conclusions drawn from this research were that culture and gender were
observed to have strong influences on social interaction as an e-government awareness
channel; but significantly low influence on the other means of e-government awareness
channels. Further, social interaction was noted to be a very strong determinant of
communication within the indigenous societies. From the research findings it was learnt that
for e-government to spread extensively, social interaction should be employed to improve the
diffusion of e-government products and services. Future directions of this research include
using a quantitative research approach to improve research findings and also investigating the
relationships of trust of egovernment personnel and other forms of trust identified by
previous research, i.e. the trust of government and trust in e-government. However, the view
of this research is that since few studies of this kind are emphasized within IS research
evaluating e-government diffusion, developing countries, culture and gender, other
researchers interested in a topic similar to this research will learn of the importance of this
research and these factors for other developing countries in the world. Due to the limitations
of time and distance and financial constraints all the indigenous communities could not be
represented. Hence, this was also considered to be a limitation to this research.