Sustainability of community driven development projects in Zomba Districts in the context of local development Framework.

Abstract

There is worldwide consensus and increased attention in Malawi to issues pertaining to sustainability of community-driven projects as policy makers and funders become increasingly concerned with allocating scarce resources effectively and efficiently. This is even more critical in Malawi now when the country has experienced unprecedented mushrooming of community driven projects since the decentralized planning framework(LPS) was constituted. Therefore, the overall research argument is that most the projects have failed to be sustainable because of the way community participation, local organization capacity and linkages between LPS and community projects have been handled. The case study investigated the potential of achieving sustainability of community driven projects through both quantitative and qualitative methods to collect and analyze data. Data was collected from both the secondary and primary data sources. The findings are based on a comparative study of four projects from Zomba District which were divided into two groups: two income generating activities projects and two food security projects. The study set out to achieve the following objectives: (1) To examine the extent to which project service delivery is responsive to people's needs. 2) To expose how local organizational; capacity of the beneficiaries affect community project sustainability: (3) To establish how development partners have influenced the sustainability of community-driven projects and(4) To investigate how linkages in the local planning structure affect sustainability of community-driven projects. The findings reveal that there are higher levels of participation and considerable match between the projects' objectives and the people's needs which is associated with demand and project sustainability. Secondly, the study has demonstrated that there is positive relationship between local organizational factors and project sustainability. Thirdly the capacity of local planning structure is undermined by lack of adequate resources, particularly , financial resources which is exacerbated by the setting up of the parallel structures and usurpation of implementation responsibilities by the donors and government-sponsored projects. Finally, the quantitative data on the influence of linkages on project sustainability are no categorized given that there are many unexplained linkages that go into influencing the project sustainability. However, qualitative data provide overwhelming evidence that no community project can achieve project sustainability without being linked to the local planning structure. In conclusion the study recommends that all development partners need to work within the local development framework(LPS), especially District Development Planning System to increase the potential for project sustainability.