An Investigation of Structural Capacity as a Component of Monitoring and Evaluation in Project Success of Road Construction Projects in Kenya

The transport sector in Kenya contributes about 6% of the gross domestic product and is critical in providing the necessary linkages for promoting national and regional interconnectivity as well as trade. Developments in the road construction industry in Kenya are increasing in size, technology complexity, interdependencies, and variations in demands from clients. Enormous donor and government resources are provided to various road contractors for the construction of road projects in Kenya.
Monitoring and evaluation of road projects implementation is paramount in determining the success of road construction projects. It is hypothesized that poor and inefficient monitoring and evaluation of road construction projects could be one of the causes of endemic project delays and poor workmanships on completed road projects. It was therefore imperative to examine the monitoring and evaluation systems used in road construction projects in Kenya, and assess their effectiveness, with a particular emphasis on the components of monitoring and evaluation system. The objective of this study was therefore to assess the influence of monitoring and evaluation system on project success. The target population of this study was the road contractors and regulatory bodies involved in ongoing road construction projects in Nairobi city and its environs. A descriptive study design was used to collect quantitative and qualitative data. Primary data was collected by use of structured questionnaires. The questionnaire was designed to respond to research question. Secondary data was collected through review of published literature such as journal articles, published theses and textbooks. The data collected from the field was captured using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and Microsoft excel. Descriptive statistics including frequency, percentages and means were employed and a summary graphs, pie charts and frequency distribution tables given. Content analysis was used to analyze qualitative data to help triangulate quantitative data.

Correlation of the main variables that is project mission, structural capacity, processes and outcome mapping which are also components of monitoring and evaluation was calculated using SPSS to find out how individually they influenced project quality. It was found out that all the components correlate positively. The study also found these findings are consistent with earlier research findings by Mackay (2007) that a problem in African countries is lack of adequate data for M&E.