Influence of multinational projects on the welfare of communities: The case of base titanium project in Kwale county, Kenya

Abstract

The case of Base Titanium and its effects on the society have been felt in the whole world, Africa and by narrower extent in Kenya especially in the Kwale County where its plant is situated at Maumba. Based on the titanium mining project in Kwale County, communities living in Nguluku were the first hand people who received the company’s effects as early as it started its operation (Republic of Kenya, 2013). Starting with the negative influence to this community for example, the Nguluku people were first relocated to Bwiti without being involved in the process. In this regard, the study found the grounds to investigate the influence of multinational projects on the welfare of the people while focusing on Base Titanium operating in Kwale County. Among the felt influences were looked at from the objectives, focusing on labour and employment, education, pollution and displacement coupled with resettlement. Comprehensive literature review has been done to gather information on the influence of multinational extractive companies to the welfare of the communities from the previous researchers, followed with structured questionnaire distribution as a tool to collect data. Stratified Random sampling technique was selected as the appropriate sampling method giving equal chances to the population. This randomly sampled respondents from various NGOs like NEMA, the company employees and the local adults. The data obtained through the questionnaires that were distributed by the researcher and some enumerators to some 130 respondents achieved 110 return rates and the data was coded and analyzed using the SPSS 20.0.Hypothesis testing was done using Chi-Square and in all the cases, alternative hypothesis was favored. The research found out that there has been a significant influence by the project in Kwale County on creation of labour and employment, on the levels of education in the County, on pollution level and also on the levels of displacement and compensation in the County. The study recommends that the multinational corporations should be strengthened in the country and the jobs they create should be equally shared among the citizens. Both the county government and the national government should come up with strategies that involve various activities that should attract more stakeholders to encourage the multinational companies in investing in activities across the country.