Community Participation in Self-help Water Projects in Kiambu District

Abstract

Community Participation is a very popular paradigm in empowering the people to not only to be beneficiaries but also agents of development in their projects. It is a way to lead to successful and self sustainable projects. The rationale behind this is to involve the people on the other side of the drawing board so that they are the architects of their projects. This management research is based on the theme of community participation with a specific reference on the self help projects in Kiambu District. The study sought to establish the degrees of participation and success of these projects. Another aim was to establish the relationship between participation of the community and how the projects p rforrned. A thorough literature review on the subject of participation has revealed that community participation improves the performance of projects. The study was conducted by assessing the various variables that comprise the stages of a project This was done mainly through self administered questionnaires. This stages were mainly the initiation, consultation, construction and post implementation. Findings from the researcher got into conclusions that community participation does contribute to a large extent t,h.e success of projects. It is important to involve the stakeholders and emphatically at the consultation and the post implementation phases of a project life cycle. It was recommended that participation the people should be involved in these stages because of the impact this has on the performance and the longterm sustainability of the projects.