The Role of External Stakeholders in the Strategy Implementation at Higher Education Loans Board

Abstract

Strategy formulation and development is the development of long term plans for the effective management of opportunities and threats in light of the organization’s strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand strategy implementation is the process that turns implementation strategies and plans into actions to accomplish objectives. The study aimed at establishing the role of external stakeholders in strategy implementation at the Higher Education Loans Board. Towards the realization of the same objective, a case study research design was adopted whereby the researcher interviewed six managers in HELB and one manager each from Kenya Revenue Authority and Kenya Commercial Bank. The respondents had different academic qualifications and years of experiences in dealing with implementation of the institutions strategies and also partnering with external stakeholders. The data was collected through the use of the interview guide that was prepared to guide the researcher on the research objective. The findings of the study were that HELB depends a lot in the partnering with external stakeholders in the realisation of its strategic objectives. The role that the external stakeholders play in the strategic process of HELB were identified to include: assistance in the process of loan recovery and ensuring effective and efficient compliance to the HELB Act, facilitating institutional linkage between the stakeholders and the institution in such areas as creating electronic linkage between the partners and also devising of ways to mitigate against risk exposure to the organization. These activities were

identified as the core functions and therefore external stakeholders will have to be given a priority during the development and implementation of the institution strategies. Strategy formulation and implementation process is recommended for the functioning of any organization. Therefore, an organization should put in place adequate mechanism of incorporating the views of all the stakeholders in the development of the strategies and that for a successful implementation of the same strategies, the organization should be able to identify the challenges that will hinder the successful implementation of its strategies. In addition, the management team should be able to build in a monitoring and evaluation mechanism of telling when the strategy objectives are not being realized. From this, the organization should be able to come up with appropriate measure to overcome the challenges early enough before they affect the realization of its objectives.