Technology and quality of road construction projects in Kenya:a focus on contractor’s exposure to technology in Machakos Sub-County

Abstract

Road traffic accidents are a menace to a developing country such as Kenya. The National Transport and Safety Authority website records over 57,171 cases of road traffic accidents NTSA [15]. Adopting the root cause analysis technique, it is crucial to determine and to solve the cause of a problem in order to have a permanent solution for it. This study focuses on road construction projects which are the actual onset of road traffic accidents. Occurrences of road traffic accidents are dependent on various factors ranging from the ideology of road construction projects to the operation of a sound or unsound vehicle on the road. Numerous studies have been done to research on the factors influencing quality of road construction projects but little has been done to determine how contractors related factors affect quality of road construction projects. Due to the research gap in the pool of knowledge, this study is aimed at identifying and analyzing how contractor’s exposure to technology influences the quality of road construction projects. The study area that was analyzed in this project was Machakos sub-county situated in the Lower Eastern region of Kenya. The study was guided by the objective: to establish influence of contractor’s exposure to technology on quality of road construction projects. This study applied Systems theory approach. A descriptive survey research design and a cross-sectional approach was used to collect quantitative data by use of close-ended questionnaires. The total target population was 223and a calculative formula adopted from Kothari [8] was used to acquire a sample size of 141 respondents. Stratified random sampling technique was applied on the sample size of 141 respondents to classify them into homogenous groups. Questionnaires were used as the main data collection instruments and were issued to the respondents. The gathered data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics with the data being presented descriptively using frequencies and percentages. Pearson’s product moment correlation procedure method was used to analyze the inferential statistic data and the results presented. In this study Spearman’s was used to measure the degree of association between the independent and dependent variables. On the influence of contractor’s exposure to technology, a composite mean of 3.74, standard deviation of 1.028 and a strong correlation value of 0.373 were achieved. The survey elicit conclusion was that quality of road construction projects in Machakos Sub-County was influenced by the independent variable.