Strategic Management Practices And Emergency Responses By Kenya Red Cross

Abstract

The environment where organisations operate is increasingly evolving, and this is forcing organisations to find coping strategies in order to survive and realise their vision and mission. Strategic management practices help organisations to manage people and resources towards achieving set goals and objectives. This objective of this study was determining the effect of strategic management practices on emergency responses by Kenya Red Cross. To achieve this objective, the study adopted a case study research design in enabling the researcher to conduct an in-depth investigation of Kenya Red Cross (KRC), through establishing the effect of strategic management practices on emergency responses. An interview guide was applied to collect primary data through interviewing 5 Heads of Departments: Finance and Accounts, Planning, Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, Human Resource, Disaster Risk Management and Disaster Management. Primary data was collected with help of interview guide and analysis was done using content analysis. It was found that the commonly used strategic management practices by KRC were strategy formulation, strategic leadership, environmental scanning, monitoring and evaluation and strategy implementation. It was further discovered that effective use of strategic management practices by KRC enhanced efficiency towards responding to emergencies. The organisation was able to match employees’ skills and competencies to their tasks, share knowledge, organise resources, improve communication, forecasting eventualities and risks, this enabled KRC to respond efficiently to emergencies. The study proposes the need for KRC to allocate more resources and funds to invest in sophisticated technologies such as satellite images to detect changes in weather and identify areas that pose risks of emergencies. This will prompt preparedness, deployment of resources and personnel, communication and coordination of activities and people towards responding to emergencies. KRC should also engage its employees to a continuous training and development program to sharpen their skills and knowledge in responding to emergencies. Because of the limitation of time and resources, the researcher was forced to do a case study of KRC and thus, the findings obtained in this study are strictly limited to KRC, and cannot be applied directly or indirectly to generalize humanitarian sector in Kenya. It is necessary for future researchers to consider conducting a replica of this study to include all humanitarian organisations in Kenya, this will allow researchers to compare findings then a plausible conclusion will be drawn