Resource Capacity and Implementation of Affordable Residential Housing Projects in Machakos County, Kenya

Abstract

The supply of housing for low-income households in Kenya continues to remain behind demand and majority of the urban dwellers live in informal settlements since they cannot afford housing in formal market. The housing policies and strategies put in place over the last 30 years failed to provide adequate and affordable housing to all segments of the urban population and this compelled the Kenyan Government to re-think its policy on housing affordability. In 2017 the Kenyan government launched the Affordable Housing Programme which takes cognizance of the different social economic strata of the population. This study sought to investigate the influence of resource capacity and implementation of affordable housing projects. The study site was Machakos County in Kenya. The exogenous variables of this investigation were: financial resources, human resources and social capital resources. The study was based on three theories: resource based view theory, general system theory and program theory. Descriptive survey research design was employed as the study research design. Moreover, the study population constituted all stakeholders in affordable housing projects specifically in Machakos County. A sample of 297 was drawn from determined target population of 1262. Two research instruments; questionnaire and interview guide were used in this research. Interview guide was used to help collect qualitative data from key informants while questionnaire collected quantitative data. The data was analysed using SPSS version 25.0 software. The model summary showed that there was a positive relationship between the dependent and independent variables with different scores and thus the null hypothesis which stated that there was no significant relationship between resource capacity and implementation of affordable housing project was rejected. Financial capacity had the highest score with human resource capital having the lowest score. The study recommended that the government needs to establish a link between the national government, county government and the financial institutions so that there can be a continued flow of financial resources/reserves which were found to have the highest influence on the implementation of housing project, the county government needs to put up mechanisms for training of the staff who are involved in the implementation of these projects. There is need for inductions for the employees for further career development in their fields and that there is need to have vigorous consultative meetings among the stakeholders so that there is a constant briefing so that each stakeholder has fist hand information on the progress of the project. The study suggested a similar study to be done in other counties where this affordable housing project was done so that the results can be compared with this one. This will give a broad view of the whole phenomenon and a study on monitoring and evaluation be done in order to answer some of the questions which respondents had neutral opinion such as whether the project can borrow and service their loans without a challenge.