Role of mass media in creating awareness in the decentralised funds: a case study of LATF and CDF in Kajiado north constituency.
Abstract
The world all over has come to appreciate the significant role that
communication plays in any endeavour that hopes to be successful.
Communication has been proven to help achieve success and sustenance
for projects and even organisations. Thus communication is an
indispensable part of management and implementation of a project.
It is against such a background that the research set out to evaluate the
use of communication by the Decentralized Funds; specifically, the use
of mass media to create awareness of two funds; CDF and LATF. The
two funds are tailored on participatory development that involves the
community III the management of the projects that they establish. In
this regard there needs to be adequate communication to the various
communities so as to ensure effective participation.
The study undertook a survey to identify the various tools of mass
media that the Funds used with the aim of establishing whether the
respondents were familiar with these tools. The study also undertook an
audit of these tools with the aim of establishing how appropriate they
were and therefore be able to give recommendations on how to improve
them. An establishment of the challenges that the Funds were faced with
in regard to communicating to the communities was also done, with the
aim of giving recommendations on how to overcome them thereby
improve communication.
From the findings, it became clear that little or no effort had been made
to use the mass media in the creation of awareness of the activities of the
Funds. The little effort that had been made was not making the
expected impact due to poor implementation strategies. For CDF the
higher levels of awareness were mainly as a result of the political nature
of the fund, which made it enjoy good media coverage.
Publisher
School of Journalism, University of Nairobi