| dc.description.abstract | In recent years the Kenyan government has stepped up efforts to find a lasting solution to the problem of extreme poverty and hunger which has ravaged many parts of the country. Towards this end, the government has joined forces with various stakeholders to ensure that efforts towards this noble objective are sustainable in order to ensure a lasting solution to the problem of poverty, hunger and to achieve MDGs. Similarly the United Nations has laid prominence on the MDGs as a one way ticket out of poverty and hunger problems across the world. Interventions towards this are implemented through the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) which was piloted in Sauri, Kenya in the year 2005. MVP is a collaborative approach between the Millennium promise alliance, the UNDP, the Earths Institute of Columbia University and the host country's line ministries.
The study was necessitated by the fact the past model villages interventions along which MVP is modelled were not successful beyond the level of pilot project. The study was guided by three objectives; to establish the influence of project design on sustainability of donor funded poverty reduction projects; to examine the influence of stakeholder participation on sustainability of donor funded poverty reduction projects and to determine the influence of management on sustainability of donor funded poverty reduction projects.
The research was also guided by a null hypothesis; community resilience does not influence sustainability of donor funded poverty reduction projects. Review of relevant literature revealed that development industry as a whole has a poor track record in designing and implementing sustainable projects in the field indicating the need for conducting research to establish factors that influence the sustainability of benefits and outcomes of such projects. The research adopted a cross sectional survey design employing the use of questionnaires, key informant interviews and direct observation as the primary data collection tools while secondary data was collected through desk review of relevant project documents. The sample size was 169 from an accessible population of 300 MVP beneficiaries.
The respondents for the study were purposively and randomly selected. Direct observation was used to collect data on completed and continuing project activities. The collected data was cleaned for possible errors presented in tables, organised, coded and inputted into the computer for analysis using Statistical Package for Social Sciences to generate tables, frequencies and percentages. The Null hypothesis was subjected to a Chisquare test at 5% confidence level which established that there is a significant relationship between community resilience and project sustainability.
From the data it is clear that the project succeeded in adequately involving the participation of all stakeholders in project activities while 84.4% of project beneficiaries agree that they have direct ownership of project benefits and outcomes. The findings led to the conclusion that the Sauri MVP has succeeded in ensuring sustainability of the benefits and outcomes of the project for long term poverty reduction and achievement of MDGs. The study suggested further research to be undertaken to identify the best ways to incorporate issues of Natural Resource Management in sustainable livelihood improvements projects for targeted beneficiaries in a dynamic risk environment. | en_US |
