Community Involvement In Project Planning

Not all projects and programmes are succesful as the planners hope. Think about a project or programme you know which has not really achieved its aims, and discuss the way in which it might be improved.

Introduction

The first step in all projects is to define goals and objectives. This helps to defines the projects outcome and the steps required to achieve that outcome.

However, in many cases, not all projects or programmes are successful as the planners hope. Some of the reasons of the failure, are that people, including project managers, spend little time on this step or complete it incorrectly thereby ensuring unsuccessful project completion. As a result, poorly defined goals and objectives, or goals without objectives, pushes a project

Project sustainability is influenced by several factors, but those that directly infuenced failure of the discussed project included:

• Lack of community involvement in designing, planning, implementation and monitoring and evaluation -: The community was superficially involved i.e they participated in voluntary physical activities in a project that was introduced to them without need identification. The project planners went ahead to assign their own staff to conduct the monitoring and evaluation exercise.

• Community acceptance and project ownership-: This couldnt be achieved because of the superficial involvement that lead to lack of understanding of the objectives set by the planners and hence compromising sustainability of the project. Other stakeholders e.g local leaders and politicians were passive in the project. It is clear that only the employed local staff and planners were involved actively.

• Ineficient way to evaluate and replan during the process- : The donors didn’t reassess the initial plan so as to improve the running of the

To ensure project sustainability, several attributes, which are the pillars, have to be considered. A thorough analysis is needed during formulation of a project to integrate sustainability pillars. These pillars include: community and local staff involvement and empowerment, collaboration of all stakeholders, and shared ownership,

It is of great important to have community members identify their own needs, do an analysis of the factors that lead to the needs, and draw up an action plan to address them. It is also important that, before the planner hands over the project to the community, they should design an exit and sustainability plan so as to promote continuity of the project after they are gone.

In addition, project failure is preventable with good project planning. When a project starts to fail there are different techniques used to recognize and trained project managers should be able to minimize the extend of project failure or recover the failed projects as early as possible. By following these techniques, one will enhance project’s chance of