Study of E-governance and online donors for achieving financial resilience post natural disasters

Abstract

The world is witnessing an increasing number of natural disasters. Technology has helped to combat major aspects of the same while economic and financial losses of the victims are largely unavoidable. Disaster recovery involves collaborative role of governance, technology and financial aid. The present study aims to study the behavioural aspect of financial donors who offer monetary help for financial resilience of the victims. The study uses Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) and extends it by measuring the effect of "voluntariness" in understanding the behaviour. The paper studies the floods in Kerala, India, and aims to understand how online financial donors helped in e-governance and rebuilding the State. The study collects primary data of 308 financial donors and tests it against eight hypotheses. The results show that while voluntariness acts as a mediating variable for performance expectancy and its relationship with behavioural intention, it has insignificant effect on effort expectancy. The study found four out of eight hypotheses were giving significant results. The results also confirm that e-governance portals and voluntariness activities were much higher in Kerala than any other state in the country. An important conclusion was that both societal influence and facilitating conditions played a significant role in inclining the financial donors to contribute using e-governance portals. The results could be inspiration to studies in areas where there are recurring disasters. The study also offers both practical and theoretical insights to the field of e-governance and financial resilience. Study can further be extended to geographical areas with recurring disasters to test the consistency of results.