Influence Of Non Governmental Organisations Activities On Sustainability Of Communitiy Peace Projects In Uasin-Gishu County, Kenya

Abstract

Project sustainability has been a great hindrance to the social-economic development of a community. The main reason as to why this has been the case is the failure by the project implementing organizations to consider putting more efforts on building their capacities on how projects need to be sustained beyond donor funding. The common practice has been that they implement projects as per their work plans with a sole intention to fulfil their donors‟ requirements. In Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), project sustainability has been a perennial challenge since less efforts are channelled towards important NGOs activities such as trainings offered to the project staff, project fundraising activities, sustainability planning processes and project monitoring by the NGOs. The study therefore looked into the influence of non-governmental organizations activities on sustainability of community projects in Uasin-Gishu County. The main objectives of this study were; to establish how staff trainings offered by NGOs influence sustainability of community projects; to determine how project fundraising by NGOs influence sustainability of community projects; to establish how how project monitoring by NGOs influence Sustainability of Community projects in Uasin-Gishu county. The study was based on the Sustainable development theory which was advanced by World Commission on Environment and Development. Descriptive survey design was the research design used for this study. The study targeted a total population of 125 and it derived a sample size of 112which was determined using krejcie and Morgan table of individuals where by 48 of them were project managers, 32, were project staff and another 32 being sub county peace committees . Stratified random sampling procedure was used to get information from informants such as the project managers, volunteers and staff. Questionnaires and interview schedules were used to gather the necessary data for this study. Research instruments were tested for reliability and validity before the data was collected. Data in this study was analyzed descriptively using mean and standard deviation with the help of Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) and then presented in tables. From the objectives the findings were that staff training had some influence on the sustainability of community projects with a mean of 3.56 and a standard deviation of 0.89. Project fundraising had a very significant influence on sustainability of community projects with all NGO‟s with a mean of 5.00 and standard deviation of 0.00 alluding that the donor funding they get for their projects were not enough. On the influence of sustainability planning process, minority of respondents agreed that they had a sustainability working team in place with a mean of 1.34. On influence of monitoring on sustainability of community projects, most NGOs staff agreed with a mean of 4.56 that they do monitoring of their projects for sustainability purposes. However, the same NGO‟s happened that they don‟t usually involve the community as expressed by a mean of 2.74. The research recommends that NGOs should budget and allocate financial resources earmarked for staff training, NGO‟s must diversify their sources of income and look for ways of fundraising internally, NGOs should embark on sustainability planning processes and finally NGO‟s should enhance community participation in their project monitoring. The study recommended that a research should be carried out to establish the influence of donor funding on NGO‟s consortiums formation in Kenya and secondly a study should be conducted on the level of Influence of county government development agenda on the sustainability of Non governmental Organizations community projects