| dc.description.abstract | Project sustainability termed as the surest indicator of project success on the project management continuum. Projects touching on the communities are aimed at poverty reduction as well as socio-economic development. This touches on externally initiated ideas being inevitable in addressing the community needs. Communities often respond to the ideas in a fashioned manner that characterizes decision making patterns within the community. This model defines how project ideas are conceptualized at the community, received, processed aJd applied within the community.
This phenomenon is termed community management of information, This study sought to establish the influence of community management of project information on the sustainability of donor funded projects. Specifically, the study investigated the influence of community leadership, structure, planning and coordination of the project and the media of managing project information on sustainability of donor funded projects. The study employed a descriptive survey design. The study investigated the Lifestraw water project.
The Lifestraw project aimed at supporting all households in Kakamega South district with filters for clean drinking water at each household. The Lifestraw project was implemented in April and June 2011. For this study, the target population for this study was 36,756 households of Kakamega South District and 93 village elders of which 19 village elders and 380 households were sampled using multistage random sampling methods. Two administered questionnaires were used to collect both quantitative as well as qualitative information from the household heads and village elders.
A structured interview was used to collect data from the project officers. The data which had a response rate of 79.05% was then analysed quantitatively using SPSS and qualitatively thematically. From the findings, 92.11 % of the respondents reported continuing to benefit from the project by using the water from the LifeStraw filter which shows high sustainability. Further, the analysis sought to explain the high sustainability on the basis of the study objectives. It emerges from the study that both the formal and informal leadership have supported the use of the filters in the community. With high homogeneity within the community that defines the community structure, this has to a large extent contributed to the success of the project.
In addition, the communities reported high support in relation to information needed to continue using the filters through trainings and other support materials such as training models and manuals left in the households. Further, this corroboration is triangulated with the planning of the project that inbuilt community designs within the planning and coordination that ensures high project successes.
From the study, it is recommended that both formal and informal leadership structures need to be inbuilt in the implementation of projects at the community level, community structure be used as a basis for planning community projects and need for project initiators to build the capacities of beneficiary communities to continue benefiting into project outcomes through appropriately designed training programmes and other support mechanisms. | en_US |
