Project Implementation Process and Performance of Indigenous Chicken Projects Sponsored by Agricultural Sector Development Support Programme, Machakos County, Kenya

Abstract

Indigenous chicken projects are important for food security and poverty alleviation but the performance has remained poor. Due to that there is need to identify the cause of poor performance. Therefore this paper calls for a paradigm shift in implementation of indigenous chicken projects for better Performance. It is based on a study carried out in Machakos County of Kenya focusing on the influence of project implementation process on performance of indigenous chicken projects. The study addressed project implementation process from the perspective of availability of indigenous chicken plans, usage of indigenous chicken resources and execution of indigenous chicken activities and the manner in which the process is followed. The study was guided by pragmatism paradigm using mixed method research design. The target population was 80 indigenous chicken projects which were supported by Agricultural Sector Development Support Programme. The sample of40 projects was selected through multi-stage sampling where 146 respondents were selected. Questionnaire and interview guide were used to collect data from project implementers and 10 partnering stakeholders respectively. The data was analysed descriptively using means and standard deviation. For inferential analysis, Pearson's product moment correlation and F-test were used. The descriptive statistics realized a mean score of 3.4250 and a standard deviation of 0.41705. The descriptive statistics results pointed out that the indigenous chicken project implementers agreed to theproject beingplanned, the resources being mobilized and lastly execution done. However inferential analysis indicated that project implementation process influenced performance of indigenous chicken projects statistically significantly with a moderate positive correlation where r= 0.344 and at level of significance p=0.000 <0.05. Likewise r2= 0.118 was realized showing that project implementation process contributed11.8% to performance of indigenous chicken projects.Since project implementation process only contributed 11.8% to performance of projects, there is need to do further research on influence of other indicators of project implementation process apart from availability of plans, usage of resource and execution of indigenous chicken activities on performance of projects. The study recommends that plans should be available as part of project implementation process so as to improve performance.