Role of mass media in creating awareness in the decentralised funds: a case study of LATF and CDF in Kajiado north constituency.

Abstract

The world all over has come to appreciate the significant role that communication plays in any endeavour that hopes to be successful. Communication has been proven to help achieve success and sustenance for projects and even organisations. Thus communication is an indispensable part of management and implementation of a project. It is against such a background that the research set out to evaluate the use of communication by the Decentralized Funds; specifically, the use of mass media to create awareness of two funds; CDF and LATF. The two funds are tailored on participatory development that involves the community III the management of the projects that they establish. In this regard there needs to be adequate communication to the various communities so as to ensure effective participation. The study undertook a survey to identify the various tools of mass media that the Funds used with the aim of establishing whether the respondents were familiar with these tools. The study also undertook an audit of these tools with the aim of establishing how appropriate they were and therefore be able to give recommendations on how to improve them. An establishment of the challenges that the Funds were faced with in regard to communicating to the communities was also done, with the aim of giving recommendations on how to overcome them thereby improve communication. From the findings, it became clear that little or no effort had been made to use the mass media in the creation of awareness of the activities of the Funds. The little effort that had been made was not making the expected impact due to poor implementation strategies. For CDF the higher levels of awareness were mainly as a result of the political nature of the fund, which made it enjoy good media coverage.