The real requirements live at the last mile
A government IT system designed from the head office perspective will fail in the field. The user with the weakest device and worst connectivity defines the actual constraints.
Government IT systems in Africa are typically specified and procured centrally — fibre at HQ, modern workstations, trained IT support, stable power. But the deployed reality is often different: sub-county offices running on solar power that drops at dusk, 2G or intermittent 3G connectivity, shared computers on older operating systems, and users who rotate roles before they fully learn the system.
When a system works beautifully at headquarters but fails in the field, the instinct is to blame the user or the infrastructure. The real issue is that the procurement brief was written for the best-case user, not the worst-case one. The system's genuine constraints — offline capability, low-bandwidth resilience, sync reliability, simple error recovery — were never stated as requirements because the people who wrote the brief do not experience those conditions daily.
The practical fix is to build a field user profile during the requirements phase: what device, what connectivity, what power availability, what digital literacy, what support structure? That profile becomes the design target. If the system works for that user, it works for everyone. If it only works for the HQ user, it works for no one in the long run.