Factors influencing sustainability of donor funded ICT Projects in public secondary schools in Nyeri County, Kenya.

Abstract

Donor participation in the development of ICT in Kenya has been a strategic practice to facilitate schools with ICT to advance education goals and create an ICT literate society to meet the demands of the 21sr Century. Various schools have therefore received donor support to facilitate ICT integration in teaching and learning as well as in the management of schools. However, the reported slow rate of adoption of ICT in some education institutions and decreasing functional ICT facilities after the withdrawal of the donor raises concerns over the sustainability of the projects. Yet, little had been done to examine what is behind success and failure of the donor supported ICT projects. This study sought to understand the underlying factors behind sustainable ICT donor assisted projects in public secondary schools in Nyeri County guided by the following objectives; to find out the status of ICT facilities, to establish the institutions' management strategies to sustain the JCT projects, to evaluate the teachers' JCT competencies and to assess the technical support available to sustain donor funded ICT projects. The study adopted descriptive survey design and the target population was all the 72 teachers and 3 principals in the three secondary schools. The three schools that benefitted from USAID and 3 principals were purposively sampled while 36 teachers composed of 50% of teachers per school were selected through simple random. Data was collected using questionnaires, interviews, document analysis and observation check list. Validity of the instruments was ascertained through presenting the instruments to experts in the University of Nairobi (Supervisors) for scrutiny and advice and to the cohort of Masters in Project Management finalists for peer reviewing. Reliability was ascertained through a pilot study and internal consistency test using Cronbach's Alpha which posted above 0.6 in all items. Qualitative data was analyzed through identification of opinions and quoting them verbatim. Quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics; frequency tables, percentages, and totals. The findings indicated that; ICT infrastructure provided by donors was available, functional and accessible to the teachers but was inadequate as schools did not make effort to buy more devices, Schools were short of management strategies to effectively sustain ICT projects, teachers lacked adequate ICT competency to adopt ICT in curriculum instruction while technical support was not sufficient. The study may help donors and government to understand factors underlying failure and success of donor assisted ICT projects in schools to rationalize needs based interventions.