Factors Affecting Implementation of Public Procurement Reforms in County Governments in Kenya

Abstract

Public procurement involves heavily in the purchase of goods, services and public works by government and public entities. While Kenya spends nearly Kshs 500 billion per year on the public procurement. Losses attributable to malpractices approximates Kshs 300 billion per year (World Bank, 2010). The public procurement and disposal Act 2005 was introduced in Kenya to streamline the anomalies in the public procurement. The implementation of the Public Procurement and Disposal Act 2005 has been quit challenging coupled with a number of inefficiencies. The inauguration of the new constitution 2010 which outlines principles for public procurement, the launch of public procurement disposal( preference and reservations) regulations 2011 and public procurement and disposal (county governments) regulations 2013 it‟s an effort towards the reform path but still a lot has to be done to overhaul the entire system. The objective of the study is to establish factors affecting the implementation of public procurement reforms in County Governments in Kenya. Descriptive research design was used in the study because it enables the study to generalize its findings (Cooper & Schindler, 2003).The target population for this study was the Procurement Manager & Financial Managers in the Counties or their equivalents who are involved in the procurement process. The study examined a sample of staff drawn from a population of 36 Counties out of the 47. Data analysis was done via SPSS and Microsoft Excel to generate quantitative reports through tabulations, percentages and measured central tendency. The findings of this study can be useful to counties that will be keen implement public procurement reforms as this study shows employee knowledge and skills, top management support, project team and county governments goals and objectives contributes much to implementation of public procurement reforms in county governments in Kenya. Although the study focused on the County governments, the researcher did not consider whether the size of the County Governments had an impact on the public procurement reforms implementation. Future studies could look at factors influencing public procurement reforms implementation based on the size of the Counties. The scope could also be extended to include other countries with similar structures.