Risk Analysis of Governance in Community Development Projects

Abstract

Governance in a community development project could be referred as a process of decision making in order to achieve expectations, and management goals. The good governance ensures transparency in decision making and accountability. Governance in community development projects must achieve their set objectives which focus on the government is national development policy agenda. These projects had been identified five risk areas: financial, institutional, procurement, grievance and communication. This study analyzed the risk areas of "Gemidiriya" project in order to bridge the prevailing gap in empirical information. The study aims at administrative risk areas of community development projects, determining the success level of governance while identifying the relationship between risk areas assigning values to qualitative features to give a quantitative facet. Primary data were collected from a sample of 150 employees of the community development and livelihood improvement project through a field survey by the researcher playing the role of participant as observer. The study used the stratified random sampling method as the population of 500 employees had been divided into more relevant and significant strata based on their position. Reliability of the questions was listed and that was high (0.87).The structured interviewed type of questionnaire were administered for nearly three months to collect data. The correlation analysis showed that there was a strong positive relationship between financial risks and procurement risks. Overall, finance risks and procurement risks were above the expected level but communication, grievance and institutional risks were below the expected level due to weakness in disclosure policies, poor communication progress and absence of proper grievance handling mechanism. It is recommended that the necessity of trained staff whom should also have a sound working environment free from political intervention. The appraisals and compliance handling should be done by an independent team.