Influence of stakeholder participation on performance of water projects funded by Makueni County Government: a case of Makueni Sub County.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to analyze the influence of stakeholder participation on the performance of water projects funded by Makueni County in Makueni sub-county. This research project had four guiding objectives namely; to determine how stakeholder participation in project decision making influence the performance of water projects funded by Makueni County in Makueni Sub county, to establish ;the extent to which project resource mobilization influence the performance of water projects funded by Makueni County in Makueni Cub county, to examine the level to which stakeholder participation influence the performance of water projects funded by Makueni County in Makueni sub county, and to assess the level at which stakeholder participation on project closure influence the performance of water project funded by Makueni County in Makueni Sub County. The study was guided by two theories and these are decision making theory and stakeholder theory. The research used descriptive research design alongside quantitative methods of research approach which include questionnaires. A sample size of 205 respondents was drawn from target population of 440 of the stakeholders who were project management committees representing the community, the county government executives’ in particular administrative officers and the sub county water engineers. Stratified simple random techniques were used. The reliability of the questionnaire was evaluated through Cronbach’s Alpha which measures the internal consistency. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze data. Quantitative data was tabulated and analyzed using frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviation. The findings depict that decision making, resource mobilization and monitoring and evaluation project closure leads to the performance of water projects funded by factor of -1.186, 0.424, 0.013 and 0.272 with P values of 0.11, 0.000, 0.783 and 0.000. At 5% level of significance and 95% level of confidence, this is statistically significant as the P-Value is lower than 0.05. The results for testing the hypothesis were (P=0.011<0.05), (P=0.00<0.05) (P=0.783>0.05) and (P=0.000<0.05). The study therefore rejects the null hypothesis for decision making, resource mobilization, and project closure. The study therefore fails to rejects the null hypothesis for monitoring and evaluation because P- value was greater than 0.05. Further research can be done to assess the other factors that influence the influence of stakeholder participation on the performance of water projects.