Co-creation a tool to create inclusive e-services in developing countries: A case of open data hackathon in Namibia Lameck Mbangula Amugongo Namibia University of Science & Technology Windhoek, Namibia amugongol@hotmail.co.uk Heinrich Naatwilwe Aluvilu Namibia University of Science & Technology Windhoek, Namibia heinrich91@gmail.com Emilia Shikeenga Namibia University of Science & Technology Windhoek, Namibia emiliashikeenga@gmail.com Nabot Natanael Namibia University of Science & Technology Windhoek, Namibia nabot@gmail.com ABSTRACT With the increasing adoption of digital technologies in many developing countries, it has become evident that countries in Africa have enabling environments and infrastructures to deploy state of the art ICT solutions to ease the burden of service delivery. Namibia amongst other African countries is pioneering e-governance. Additionally, e-services are becoming an integral component of governance in Namibia. However, more still needs to be done to ensure that e-services are inclusive, thus meeting the needs of intended users. In this paper, we highlight how government, developers, academia, corporate, and citizens can leverage on co-creation to design a wide range of e- services. Moreover, as a proof of concept, this paper refers to solutions developed during the 3rd Open & Big data innovation hackathon that was held at the Namibia Business Innovation Institute (NBII) in Windhoek, Namibia. Author Keywords Co-creation; co-design, e-services; hackathon, open data, citizen participation; ACM Classification Keywords Design INTRODUCTION Over the last decade, we have seen a paradigm shift in how governments carryout their day to day operations. Today, many governments are shifting from conventional ways of providing services through government offices, and taking their services online, in their efforts to become more effective and efficient. It’s not only happening in the government; private companies are also increasingly making their services available online because of the large audience. No doubt, digital services have become the new ‘Gold mine’ for many enterprises, providing the fastest growth and proliferating the notion of business with ‘no borders’. For many years, developing countries has been lagging when it comes to delivering e-services to their citizens. Resulting in citizens travelling long distances from villages into major cities and towns to access basic services such as health care, education and identification documents. However, the advent of digital technologies together with the increase in mobile coverage and broadband [1] services present unique opportunities for African countries to embark on their e-service journeys. Therefore, bringing public services such as schools and health care closer to the people. In this paper, we practically show how governments in developing countries can leverage on co-creation and co- design to harness the widely-distributed intellect among inhabitants of their countries to develop useful, inclusive and people centric digital services aimed at improving the quality of life, bringing services closer to the people and improving the quality of public service delivery. This paper is structured as follows, the subsequent section review different literature. Section 3, discusses the research methodology and methods applied. Thereafter, results of the study are outlined and discussed. In the last section, conclusions are drawn. STATE OF THE ART Conventionally, the responsibility of providing public services has been for too long confined to government Paste the appropriate copyright/license statement here. ACM now supports three different publication options: • ACM copyright: ACM holds the copyright on the work. This is the historical approach. • License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an exclusive publication license. • Open Access: The author(s) wish to pay for the work to be open access. The additional fee must be paid to ACM. This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single-spaced in Times New Roman 8-point font. Please do not change or modify the size of this text box. Each submission will be assigned a DOI string to be included here.