Influence of constituency development funded projects selection on alleviation of poverty: A case of Saboti constituency, Kenya

Abstract

Poverty alleviation is worldwide concern and both the developed and undeveloped nations use different ways to reduce poverty (UNDP, 2013). Hence, in Kenya, the CDF is used to thi s end and its aim is to redistribute national resources to the constituencies . T his study focused on the influence of Constituency Development Funded projects selection on alleviation of poverty, a case of Saboti constituency, Kenya. The study had four obj ectives and it targeted CDF officials and households . It purposively sampled the CDF officials and employed Yamane (1967) formula to determine the sample size for the households (100) . The data was gathered using questionnaires, interviews and observation schedules. The collected data w as analyzed using SPSS and content analysis. T he key findings for objective 1 comprised: the basis for CDF project selection as put forth by CDF officials was c ommunity empowerment and utility ; household respondents attesting to the fact that the community participated in project selection and in all the Wards , over 50% of the respondents alluded to community participated in project implementation . For objective 2: over 60% of the respondent in each Ward regarded selected proj ect s a priorty for the community; t he CDF officials ranked the projects selected in terms of service delivery with 45% being good, 30% aver age, 15% very good and 10% poor; households ranked the projects in order of priority and it’s only the roads that had a 61% for the first rank ; households response on the status of CDF projects reveal ed that Tuwan had the highest ( 75.9% ) while Saboti the lowest ( 44.4% ) of complete d an d in use projects; 55.3% of the households noted that selection of Project Management C ommittee was done by community and the member of parliament. For objective 3: over 60% of households respondents were either very satisfied or satisfied with the selected schools, water, health , farming and business projects ; there were 40% for school, 76. 5% for water, 71.4%, 52% for farming and 83.3% for business in favor of p rojects’ transparency ; 72.4% for Tuwan, 70% for Machewa and Kinyoro, 69.6 for Matisi and 33.3% for Saboti perceived the projects to have high im pact on community because the benefits spread to many people ; the officials perceived that more funds, proper managerial struc tures and technical support were the highly needed resource needs for project selection. For objective 4: the CDF officials revealed that corruption and poor community l eadership were the greatest challenges in project selection; over 85% of the respondents across different aspects agreed that they experienced negative impact of poverty to the community . The study concludes that project selection is a delicate and pivotal point of community initiatives towards poverty alleviation. It also recommends that that CDFC be capacity build more often and where possible exchange programmes between constituencies be promoted so that best practices can be transferred and be replicated