Effects Of Community Participation On Sustainability Of Water Projects In Makueni County, Kenya

ABSTRACT Kenya’s development agenda and initiatives has been faced with historical challenges ranging from the top-down approach in development, allocation, and direction of huge resources to unplanned and unforeseen projects, poor inception, implementation, and completion of projects. Public participation is the fundamental standard of our democracy and has gotten one of the significant conditions which are basic for the usage of projects. During the promulgation of the new Constitution, 2010, Kenya made a deliberate effort to pave the way for participatory development. However, this is not the case in most sectors, development partners, and within the counties. The study conducted 10 years after the promulgation of the new constitution sought to establish how citizen involvement in the project management cycle relates to the success and long term existence and enjoyment of the project’s benefits by the primary beneficiaries. In addition, it sought to investigate the implications of the mechanisms, processes employed, and the established county structures of public participation at the county level. The study relied on two development theories, i.e. The Community Action Model and the Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation to understand and critic their works. It employed the descriptive research design which depicts or describes the participants in an accurate way. This research was conducted in Makueni County, targeting Kibwezi West sub- County. The researcher targeted a population of 80,805 a sample size of 384. Both open and closed-ended questions/interviews were employed in this research. Data analysis was done using SPSS whereby descriptive statistics were used in quantitative data analysis while thematic analysis for qualitative data. From the findings, the study established that mechanisms, processes, and country structures employed by the county governments and other development partners directly influence project sustainability. This was explained by model analysis using the Coefficient of adjusted determination i.e. 0.722 which translates to 72.2%. This indicates that variations in the dependents variable were explained by the independent variables (Mechanism, Processes, and Country Structures). The residual of 27.8% could be explained by other factors beyond the scope of the current study. Also from ANOVA, the P-value was 0.001