Stakeholder Involvement and Service Delivery:provision of Affordable Housing by National Housing Corporation in Kenya

Abstract

The importance of identifying and including important stakeholders in the service provision process is critical since when stakeholders are excluded, the relevance and anticipated benefits from the service provided will be limited. Stakeholder involvement is considered an integral part of an organization service delivery process aimed at ensuring there is a broad support for the organizations policy and activities, to avoid conflicts and to generate as much support as possible for the success of the plan over time. The need for a broad consensus in the service delivery process is necessary especially in the present day business environment where the society plays a great role in the success of an organizations performance. It becomes imperative therefore that an organization comes up with a strategy that will not be resisted in totality by the society or if there is resistance, then the level of resistance should not curtail in total the implementation of the same organization objectives. In this study, the objective was to establish to what extent stakeholder involvement affected service delivery with regards to provision of affordable housing by the National Housing Corporation. The research design was a case study which employed primary data that was gathered from the respondents through interviews. Findings from the study indicated that when stakeholders were involved properly in the service delivery process, it resulted to increased efficiency and the operational costs are greatly reduced, which is a benefit of improved cooperation as well as minimized conflicts with crucial stakeholders. This was realized through an integrated stakeholder involvement which was a key initiative towards achieving the organization’s strategic objective. Findings from the research also revealed the ease of success achievement especially superior practices on stakeholder involvement are adopted by a firm thus leading to increased outputs, superior collaboration and synchronization with the external environment which extensively leads to successful service delivery implementation and thus resulting to achievement of goals of the organization. Based on the aforementioned, the study recommended wider inclusion of stakeholders in the service provision operations. While this inclusion would ensure wider ownership of projects implementation and success, it would also assist in faster decision making to avoid stalling of projects. In addition, it could be highly desirable for the corporation to engage stakeholders especially those regulating its operations and funding agencies for the purpose of mitigating challenges which might distract the corporation from its goal of providing quality service. On this basis, there is need to investigate how different players can have harmonized application models that can be understood by all participants/stakeholders in the housing sector. Also, it is worthwhile to conduct a detailed and cross-sectional practical examination among service providers of affordable housing in Kenya to establish universal stakeholder involvement practices to help in unifying the housing provision approaches while providing a basis for learning and continual service improvements.