Title:	FACTORS INFLUENCING THE INTEGRATION OF SOCIAL GRANTS INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN THE NAMIBIAN GOVERNMENT: ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY ANALYSIS
Author(s):	Filippus Nafuka and Irja Shaanika
ISBN:	978-989-8704-48-1
Editors:	Miguel Baptista Nunes, Pedro Isaías and Philip Powell
Year:	2023
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	Social Grants, Information Systems, Actor-Network Theory, Information Systems Integration, Namibia
Type:	Full Paper
First Page:	49
Last Page:	58
Language:	English
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Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	The government of Namibia strives to alleviate poverty by providing social grants to its citizens. Some of the social grant schemes provided by the Namibian government include old-age pensions, disability grants, orphans and vulnerable children state maintenance grants and veterans' monthly subventions. The government is currently faced with challenges in the administration and provision of social grants. The challenges include data duplications, beneficiaries' inclusion and exclusion errors and beneficiaries' payment irregularities such as duplicate payments, payment into wrong accounts, payment rejections, and over and underpayment are attributed to the silo information systems which are used by Ministries in the administration of social grants. The challenges above call for the integration of social grants information systems, as a measure to solve them. Otherwise, the challenges will persist which will negatively keep affecting the government's provision of social grants to the citizens. Therefore, this study primarily aims to investigate and understand the factors that can impact the integration of the social grants' information systems among the ministries. Two cases, the Ministry of Gender Equality, Poverty Eradication and Social Welfare, and the Ministry of Defence and Veterans Affairs, were qualitatively studied. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and documentation technique. Actor-Network Theory's moments of translation was employed as a lens to help examine and understand the technical and non-technical factors that can impact the integration of the social grants information systems. Nine factors namely: payment irregularities, eligibility check mechanisms, non-distributed systems setup, data migration challenges, system development skills shortage, systems in-house support and maintenance, un-documented systems, and memorandum of understanding were found to impact the integration of the social grants information system.
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