| dc.description.abstract | Community involvement in the development discourse has often been hailed as the ideal
situation when tackling poverty and other social ills at the grassroots. The most desirable
outcome of this being community empowerment and emancipation. The purpose of this
research is to identify the participation strategies that development agents in Embakasi West
constituency have applied to combat the socio-economic challenges that the residents face
through the Constituency Development Fund vehicle. The researcher sought views from
respondents living in the constituency’s four wards: Umoja 1, Umoja 2, Mowlem and
Kariobangi South/Uhuru which collectively have a population of 187,020 mostly youths aged
between 18 and 35 years. The study adopted a mixed method research design which is a
procedure for collecting, analysing and mixing both quantitative and qualitative research and
methods in a single study to understand a research problem. Mixed approach was most
suitable for this study as it provided a better understanding of the research problem than
either type (qualitative or quantitative) by themselves. The main research findings revealed
that the Member of Parliament for this constituency, Hon. George Theuri has elaborate plans
for the youth – a majority population that lives in the area. These include use of the Uwezo
Fund to finance their business ventures, street lighting, repair and construction of roads and
social amenities, building of dispensaries and residents for medical practioners, Mama Lucy
Kiosks, police posts, boreholes to provide clean water, ‘Feroze’ market that provides a public
space for business people to sell their wares, just to mention a few. Public agents in this
constituency have adopted social media and public Barazas as their media for
communication. However, the impacts of these youth-centred initiatives are far from being
felt and a lot still needs to be done to improve the overall development agenda in the area.
Rampant corruption, lack of consultation, transparency and accountability challenges were
highlighted by the respondents. The researcher concluded that participatory development is a
complex process with many challenges and barriers faced by both communities and Public
Agents. Furthermore, there seems to be much overlap between the challenges and barriers
faced by communities and those faced by the agents. This suggests that ways to address these
barriers and challenges may be most effective when communities and agents work together in
partnership. | en_US |
