Determinants of sustainability of Community Driven Development (CDD) projects in Uganda: A case study of Kawempe Division- Kampala City

Abstract

With an aim of fighting poverty at the grass root, many donors and facilitators are opting to channel their funding through Community Driven Development (CDD) projects. These CDD projects have a gestation period or life-span in all the areas or communities. In order to achieve the goals of these programs with the planned resources, there is need to find a way of how best these can be sustained or managed by the community after the gestation period (phase-out). This study is motivated by the fact that there are numerous efforts in the recent past of phasing out the community based projects but there is failure on the part of the communities in managing or sustaining those projects. The research was set out to find out determinants of sustainability of Community Driven Development (CDD) Projects in Kawempe Division, Kampala City. This was through the following objectives; to examine how stakeholders‘ participation influenced sustainability of CDD projects, how management skills influenced sustainability of CDD projects and how regular support from Government and Non-Government influenced sustainability of CDD projects. The research took the form of descriptive analysis and both qualitative and quantitative data were collected. The primary respondents were CDD beneficiaries while the key informants were technical staffs of KCCA and local leaders who were selected through random and purposeful sampling respectively. Data was analyzed using SPSS software. The study concluded that the majority of the respondents had participated in the initiation/start of CDD projects. However, the level of other stakeholders‘ participation in the CDD projects was low which affected the sustainability of CDD project. However, although respondents were able to articulate the benefits of stakeholders‘ participation, the actual meaningful participation was lacking as such could not reap the actual benefits of participation of stakeholders towards sustainability of the projects. It was further found out that CDD projects were complex and require multifaceted management skills, the leadership skills of the managers of the CDD projects were moderately satisfactory and management of projects has increased the alignment of development CDD projects with local communities‘ priorities to a moderate extent. It was also established that the support of government through increased funding, technical appraisal of projects, and creating room for the participation of Non-Government organizations was critical for the sustainability of the projects right away from mobilization, sensitizations, assessments and post funding monitoring of the beneficiaries in the community. It was recommended among others that assessments of the projects to be funded should be made stringent with technical, social and financial appraisals to ensure that productive projects are funded and that the policy should provide for flexible funding to enable big projects above 5 million to be funded if such projects have passed the appraisal.The level of stakeholders‘ participation in the project planning and implementation should be increased to enhance the sustainability of the CDD projects in the Division.