Organizational Factors, Monitoring and Evaluation and Performance of Health Projects Funded by County Government of Meru, Kenya

Abstract

Organizational factors such as structure and culture have a critical role in the general performance of an organization. In order to ensure successful completion of projects, project teams should maintain quality performance with effective human resource management practices whilst having monitoring and evaluation in place since monitoring and evaluation assists project managers to keep track on the implementation of the projects and in the utilization of the resources. This study endeavored to investigate organizational factors, monitoring and evaluation and the performance of health projects funded by the county government of Meru, Kenya. The study objectives were to establish the influence of organizational structure, organizational culture, human resource management practices on the performance of health projects, to find out the influence of monitoring and evaluation on the performance of health projects funded by the county government of Meru and finally, to assess the moderating influence of monitoring and evaluation on the relationship between organizational structure, organizational culture and human resource management practices and the performance of health projects funded by the county government of Meru, Kenya. The study was informed by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, theory of project implementation and the institutional theory. Pragmatism research paradigm was adopted. The research design used was both descriptive survey and explanatory research designs. Target population included health projects funded by the county government of Meru since 2013 to 2017 in all sub-counties. During the years 2013-2017, only fifty four (54) health projects were proposed and implemented. County Executive Committee members, Chief Officers, directors, Sub County health officers, nurses in charge, nurses, laboratory assistants and pharmacists in the 54 health projects were sampled forming a sample size of 222 respondents. Dispensaries’ management was the key stakeholders and 38 of them were sampled. Questionnaires and interview schedules were used as the data collection tools. Analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data was done with the use of Statistical Package for Social Sciences software version 25 where descriptive statistics (percentages, frequencies, means and standard deviations) and inferential statistics (regression analysis) were conducted. Analyzed data was presented using tables. Findings showed that 57% of the respondents were male, 61% had attained a diploma as the highest level of education and those aged 30-39 years represented 51% of the respondents. The findings further indicated that 50% of the key stakeholders were male, 68% had bachelor’s degree as their highest level of education while 61% were aged between 40-49 years. Further, a positive and significant linear relationship between organizational structure, organizational culture, human resource management practices and monitoring and evaluation and performance of health projects was found. Moreover, a significant strong and moderate positive correlation between performance of health projects and organizational structure, organizational culture, human resource management practices and monitoring and evaluation was found. The study findings established that organizational factors, human resource management practices, monitoring and evaluation are key performance factors when implementing health projects and thus critical in improving performance of projects. The study recommends counties to establish policies that would see organizational factors, human resource management practices, monitoring and evaluation systems built in health projects to improve data exchange within organizations, departments and even with other organizations. There is also need to set a policy that would be the basis in which monitoring and evaluation in the county would be formulated and agreed upon for use in monitoring and evaluation of health projects. This would ensure some level of quality in the implementation of health projects in monitoring and evaluation and the resulting benefits.