Participatory Project Cycle Management and Performance of Donor Funded Projects in Mandera County, Kenya

Abstract

The performance of donor funded projects in the global arena has been linked by previous studies to participatory project cycle management. According to report by senate county public accounts and investment committee report of 2019, 60% donor funded projects in Mandera County did not perform as expected and did not achieve their objectives. The study's particular goals were to evaluate the impact of participatory identification of the project, planning, implementation and monitoring and assessment on performance of projects in Mandera County supported by donations. The research was directed by community action planning theory, Freire’s theory, Arnstein’s Ladder of citizen participation and theory of change.The research was done using a descriptive research approach.. The study's intended audience was 84 donor funded projects in Mandera County. The size of the sample for the study was 16 donor funded projects representing 20% of the total sample size. The selection process used stratified random sampling. 16 project coordinators from the sampled donor funded projects and 344 household heads the households benefiting based on the chosen donor-funded programs in Mandera County. Questionnaires for household heads and interview schedules for the project coordinators were used as the primary data collection instruments. The acquired data was cleaned, coded, and put into the SPSS version 21 statistical package for social sciences. The study discovered that participation of key stakeholders in project identification, planning, implementation and monitoring and evaluation have a significant influence on performance of donor funded projects in Mandera County. The study recommends that organizations executing projects in Mandera County should encourage participation of the community Due to their major impact on the success of initiatives sponsored by donors, they are taken into account in project planning, monitoring, and assessment.. Further studies should be conducted to assess the determinants of low community participation in planning and monitoring and evaluation. The current study only sampled household heads and ignored other stakeholders. Therefore future studies should replicate the current study but widen the scope of the sampled respondents to include other stakeholders. Keywords: Participatory Project, Cycle Management, Donor Funded Projects, Projects Performance, Project Monitoring.