The Involvement of Pupils in Sustaining Water Sanitation and Hygiene (Wash) Projects in Kisumu West District Schools Kenya

Abstract

The concept of stakeholder participation was embraced in response to inadequacies in community development planning of 1950s and 1960s, which mainly adopted topdown approach in decision making. In recent years, development agencies especially governments and donor communities have embraced this concept in their WASH programmes through their policies of decentralization, privatization and transparent governance. This was informed by the fact that it played a major role in sustaining community projects. In Kisumu West District however studies conducted on sustainable measures on Water, Sanitation and Health (WASH) facilities by SWASHPLUS in 2004 indicated that only 5 schools out of 55 that were piloted were in usable, accessible and hygienic condition, this indicates that a high percentage of the structures had become dysfunctional within a period less than ten years which is below the expected life span of such structures. This study therefore investigated the extent of the interaction between the pupils and overall planning of WASH projects with a view to establishing whether this contributes to the fast rate at which the water and sanitation infrastructure degenerates, the study concluded that pupil participation in WASH projects was still wanting and needed to be extended to include issues beyond behavior practice where a majority of pupils take part, the study recommended that it is important that pupils be involved from project initiation to designing and technology down to monitoring and evaluation of their usage in order to ensure that they sustain. The objective of this study therefore was to assess the role of pupils in sustaining WASH projects: Examine the role of pupils in planning process, asses the role of pupils in implementation and management process as well as examining the role of pupils in monitoring and evaluation of the usage of these facilities. Study population involved pupils, teachers and key informants. A total of 67 schools having 19005 pupils, 547 teachers were used as well as CBOS and relevant government agencies. Students size was determined by Cole's formula, while there selection was done by probability sampling. School sizes was obtained by one third rule as established by Elsevies, selection of teachers was by convenience sampling while CBO's was by saturated sampling. Primary data was obtained through questionnaires, in depth interviews and direct observation. Secondary data was obtained from already available resources. All the data was analyzed continuously. Descriptive techniques was used to represent qualitative data while quantitative data was be analyzed by use of SPSS .The findings was given in form of a report