PUBLIC PARTICIPATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF HEALTH PROJECTS IN KAJIADO NORTH SUB-COUNTY, KENYA

Abstract

ABSTRACT Public participation as a governance principle is a legal requirement for planning and budgeting in the healthcare sector in Kenya. Its purpose is to ensure shared responsibility in leadership since it allows governments to partner with the public in responding to issues that concern them using all available resources, both local and external. However, in many cases, members of the public are either not involved at all or they are invited to participate but not empowered to take part meaningfully in what is supposed to be participatory decision making for the health sector. The end result is that the priorities of communities are systematically overlooked and “expert-initiated” projects are thereafter often exposed to the risk of abandonment by successive regimes due to changing priorities or they simply do not meet the health needs of the population. This study therefore sought to investigate how public participation influenced the execution of health projects in Kajiado County’s most populous sub-county; Kajiado North. The objectives of the study were to establish the influence of public participation on the development of health projects in Kajiado North Sub- County, to assess the public participation mechanisms in development of health projects in Kajiado North Sub- County, to establish how information about public participation for health projects is transmitted among stakeholders of Kajiado North-SubCounty, and to determine how the governance structures can contribute towards meaningful public participation in the development of health projects in Kajiado North Sub-County. In terms of design, this study took a mixed methods research approach involving both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection. Projects under consideration were those initiated from the beginning of devolution (2013) to 2022 with the county’s CIDPs and other development planning policies being the main reference point. Survey data was obtained from households within all the five wards of Kajiado North Sub- County while the qualitative aspects of the research involved stakeholders form the ward, sub- county as well as county level.