ارزیابی چالش های پذیرش تجارت الکترونیکی در تانزانیا Assessing the challenges to e-commerce adoption in Tanzania

1 | INTRODUCTION Tanzania is ranked 107th of 193 nations in B2B e-commerce (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2016). As of June 2017, only 13% of the population of 56,877,529 were using the Internet at home, and only 1% had a credit card (Internet World Stats, 2017). As Exhibit 1 (page 44) shows, the number of secured Internet servers per 1 million people in Tanzania was a mere 1.5 in 2014 and only 2.04 in 2015. In 2016, Tanzania had only 2.1 secure Internet servers using encryption technology per million people (World Bank, 2017). In the East African Region, Tanzania trails only Kenya and Uganda in the use of Internet technology and is followed by Rwanda and Burundi, but this position isn’t strong enough for Tanzania to compete in a global context or even among other African nations such as South Africa, Mauritius, Morocco, and Nigeria (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2016). Although the incorporation of e-commerce into business processes has become the norm throughout the world, even organizations in advanced economies continue to encounter e-commerce adoption problems (Seethamraju, 2006). In Tanzania, several constraints have prevented e-commerce from being broadly adopted, such as the low rate of Internet penetration and the high investment costs associated with investment in e-commerce (Kabanda & Brown, 2017). Unless stakeholders take action, Tanzania risks losing even the low level of competitive advantage it has in comparison to other developing countries that currently trail it in e-commerce implementation. Barriers to the adoption of e-commerce technologies in Tanzania include fear and uncertainty on the part of business owners who prefer to stick with traditional practices and shun new solutions centered on e-commerce (Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority, 2014). To date, the government has not played a significant role in promoting e-commerce absorption among businesses. The current drivers of e-commerce in Tanzania are private practitioners, but even they, given the absence of motivational factors, are slow to make the changes needed to fully take advantage of new technologies (Al-Alawi & Al-Ali, 2015). To address this situation, it is important to: • Identify the factors that are important to the adoption of e-commerce in Tanzania. • Assess the significance of the factors that are important to the adoption of e-commerce in Tanzania. • Determine the scope of e-commerce adoption in Tanzania and its impact on business processes. • Define the impact of e-commerce adoption on business processes and the relationship between perceived values and risks and e-commerce transactions.