Thesis:

Effects of donor funding on socio-economic development in Kenya: a case of water projects in Lamu County

The World Health Organization has previously classified Kenya as one of the countries that is water scarce in the World. Lamu County Integrated Development Plan considers the County to be among water scarce counties in Kenya. It faces serious challenges of providing potable water to its residents. There are different institutions both local and international which address the situation; they bring together a pool of resources collaborating with the communities in the development and implementation of community-led water projects targeting to increase access to water and in the long run improve the socio-economic conditions of the community. The study seeks to investigate the relationship between donor funding and the socio-economic development, how to implement donor projects effectively to improve socio-economic development and not create a culture of donor dependency in Kenya. This was implemented by the following objectives: To establish effects of donor funding on sustainability of socio-economic development in Lamu East Constituency, Lamu County, Kenya; to find out effects of donor funding on stakeholders involvement in socio-economic development in Lamu East Constituency, Lamu County, Kenya and to establish the influence of donor funding in capacity building and socio-economic development in Lamu East Constituency, Lamu County, Kenya. The theory of poverty was utilized in this study to guide the study. The descriptive research design was used to guide the study. The target population of the current study was composed of members of community-based organization (CBOs) running water projects, Water Services Providers (WSP) and County Government officials in Lamu County. The systematic random sampling technique was used to identify and for selection of the sample members who took part in the study and a sample or 80 individuals were adopted as sample members. This was composed of about 15 respondents from the Water Service Providers group while the rest were taken from members of community-based organizations. The research instruments that were used for data collection was the questionnaires. The analysis of data was done by use of Statistical Packages for Sciences version v.24 (SPSS). Some of the analysis techniques included: descriptive statistics, frequency distribution and the regression model. It was established that donor funding specifically on water projects had a statistically significant relationship on the socio-economic development in Kenya specifically of the people of Lamu County. Therefore, the conclusion is that the donor funding has a positive impact on the water projects in Lamu County and as such the donor funds enables the sustainability and the maintenance of the water projects for the community. The study recommends that in future the scholars should investigate influence the involvement of stakeholder’s on the socio-economic development of the community in their counties in Kenya. The future researches can also explore the effects of accountability of the managers of these projects in sustainability of the projects at hand.