Community Participation: A Critique of Performance of Donor Funded Projects in Low Resource Countries

Abstract

Donor-funded projects continue as a complement to the role of government in providing developmental needs to the communities. Such needs comprise economic empowerment and employment creation to communities. Nonetheless, communities have not enjoyed these benefits and have instead remained poor. Some of them have been left worse off compared to pre-project implementation. Communities in low resource countries have not had their lives changed significantly even post-implementation as well as participation in projects aimed to create jobs and empower them. Donors also fail to receive value-for-money since the desired project outcomes are not achieved. A close linkage exists between community participation and performance of donor-funded projects, which is yet to be widely explored with community engagement as a key aspect of the project cycle. Community participation is anchored in all project development phases. Indeed, into a component that cannot be overlooked throughout the phases of the project cycle.  In recent times, development proponent including governments and consortium of projects development donors has used the concept as a bargain for any project initiation. The concept has been a concern by developers including Western donors due to uncertainty of recent project performance aligned to their sponsorship. This paper focused on an analysis of studies that have been undertaken by different scholars on the concept of community participation. Through search engines such as Google Scholar, Zotero and others, 122 article journals were searched, synthesised where we selected 25 then finally identified the best 5 that addressed the area of study. We conformed to the latest publication ranging from 2013 to the current (7Years). The paper concluded that community participation is an imperative approach to the success of donor-funded project projects in low resource countries. The authors focused on a suitable participatory technique that can increase the sustainability of development projects of national and international NGOs. It was noted that participatory techniques have a positive impact on project sustainability, participatory planning and design influences participatory implementation, participatory planning and design and participatory need assessment. The five-article analysis recommended the strengthening of community participation in donor-funded projects, right from their inception to project closure and handover. Emphasis should be directed to community members' commitment as they participate in the project cycle. The adequacy of projects inputs, availability of community groups’ formation, capacity building, and level of acceptance, awareness and resource provision should also be enhanced. The community also have to be trained on participatory practices in development involvements. Proper communication should be enhanced as a recommendation through the project management cycle as well clear distribution of roles for all stakeholders within water management. It is further suggested that community members or beneficiaries should have consistent training to empower and increase their understanding regarding project sustainability or programs maintenance. It is recommended that further studies should focus on the factors that influence the sustainability of these projects.

Keywords: community participation, performance, donor funded project, low resource countries