Project-funded systems die with the project
A government system built on donor or project funding survives only as long as the operational budget is ring-fenced. Without a sustainability plan in the initial design, the system dies when the project ends.
Government digital projects in Africa are frequently funded by development partners, donor programmes, or short-term budget allocations. The system is built, commissioned, and handed over. Six months after the project closes, the system is down — no budget for cloud hosting, no trained staff left, no support contract. The pattern is so predictable that informed observers treat project-funded systems as temporary by default.
The failure is not technical. It is institutional. The project budget covered procurement and deployment, but the operational budget was never allocated. The recurrent costs — hosting, bandwidth, power, licensing, support, staff — were treated as someone else's problem. By the time the project closes, the operational owner has no line item for the system and no mandate to create one. The system becomes an orphan.
The fix belongs in the project design phase, not the handover phase. Every government IT project should include a signed operational budget commitment before procurement begins. The project plan should specify the annual operational cost, who owns it, and what budget code it falls under. If the operational budget is not approved at project launch, the project should not proceed to procurement. Sustainability is not a handover activity — it is a design constraint.