Implementation of Public Private Partnerships in Kenya’s Public Sector

Abstract

Private Public Partnerships (PPP) are today considered an integral avenue for the pursuit of Kenya‟s development agenda. They are seen as a vehicle through which the government encourages and involves the private sector through commercial investments in facilities and services; give better value for money and transfer significant risk and management to the private sector. The adoption of this mechanism has widely been herald, however there is need to ascertain and evaluate the performance of these projects in detail. The principal objective of this study is to determine the implementation process adopted by the public sector to ensure success in the achievement of the PPP objectives. The research adopted a descriptive survey with the target population comprising thirty ongoing PPP projects based in Nairobi. The study was a cross sectional survey. The study collected primary data through the use of a questionnaire which contained both open ended and closed ended questions. The study established that indeed the public sector had a defined process of implementation of PPPs. Further, the study identified multi stakeholder expectations, difficulty in defining performance output, inability to measure total cost-benefit of projects, political influence and communication challenges as the major factors that influenced implementation. The study found that political interference was a major challenge in the implementation and this aggravated the challenge of maintaining transparency and control of the implementation process. The study recommends that politics should be detached from the implementation of PPPs as a policy. Further, the study suggests that more rigorous screening be done at every stage of the project to ensure alignment of the PPP to strategy. It further recommends the need to undertake a comparative study on PPP implementation from the perspective of Private Sector companies