Community Participation and Community Empowerment in Mugoye Sub County: Kalangala District Centraluganda

Abstract

The study aimed at assessing the effectiveness of community participation as a model for community empowerment in Mugoye Sub-County Kalangala District. The specific objectives were; To examine the contributions of community participation to community empowerment in Mugoye Sub County; To assess the obstacles hindering community participation in Mugoye Sub County and To identify! suggest ways how community participation can be improved on to achieve community empowerment in Mugoye Sub County. A descriptive study design with was adopted and data collected from a sample of 100 respondents. Self-administered questionnaires and interview guide were used in the study. Qualitative findings were presented in themes in a narrative form. It was revealed that community participation has been beneficial to their community in terms of development, sustainability of projects, solving problems together among others, builds on local strengths, creativity and resource, and actively seeks to decrease dependency on, and vulnerability to. economic interests outside the community as a result sustainability is ensured, that with community participation, there is increased sustainability of projects, identification of problems, and generating solutions by the community and that Community members get to learn new skills from one another as a source of sustainability. The study revealed that obstacles that hindered community participation included lack of awareness on the importance of participation among members, poor communication and information sharing, unstipulated roles and responsibilities of leaders, lack of management capacity among members, and lack of financial resources for implementing community activities. Lastly, it was concluded that stake holders should mobilization of the community and encourage members to participate in community activities, the leaders! government should enhance accountability in the community, stake holders should mobilize and sensitize community members about the benefit of participating and should assess community members to raise funds to run most of the pending community activities, as well as help educate the community and that stake holders should help in combating illiteracy to help people understand more about the benefit of participation. Vulnerable groups should be set for associations and taken care of independently and can be helped by encouraging them to join different development associations to strengthen the. Finally, it was recommended that there is a need for the national and district health authorities to address these problems so as to provide an enabling environment that will ensure better involvement of community and loer level health facilities in the development and implementation of various health plans for better health outputs.