| dc.description.abstract | Corporate governance has received its fair share of attention in the past decade due to various
notable corporate scandals and collapses of large corporations which cause was traced to
unethical business practices. Corporate governance is meant to create a balance between the
interests of the management and the various stakeholders. It aims to ensure the company strives
to achieve its set objectives whilst having the interests of all the stakeholders at heart. Amongst
key indicators of success in business is financial performance of an entity. Financial
performance generally refers to the financial health of an entity over a given period. It
determines the return to shareholders. Financial performance of an entity is dependent on
various factors. The target population in this study was all the 65 water companies in Kenya that
were registered with WASREB as at 31st December 2015. 20 companies were selected for
study based on the size of operations and period of existence. The study used secondary data. A
data collection form was used to collect the data on corporate governance variables. The
instrument was designed to capture a broad range of data required by the researcher and
specifically capture the board size, CEO duality, existence of audit committee, and frequency of
meetings and whether there are independent directors. Financial performance was represented
by ROA, which is net income divided by Total Assets for the last three financial years 2011/12
to 2013/2015 and are available at the Auditor General and WASREB. The study finding
indicated that all the independent variables have positive coefficient. The regression results
above reveal that there is a positive relationship between dependent variable (overall
performance) and independent variables (CEO duality, size of the board, number of the board
meetings, board composition and size of the firm and gender diversity of board. | en_US |
