Challenges of Stakeholder-Participation in rural development projects

There is need for active participation of stakeholders in project design, implementation monitoring and evaluation in order to ensure high project implementation success. Rural development projects continue to experience limited productive stakeholder participation yet the underlying causes are not well documented in literature. The purpose of this study was to examine challenges that face stakeholder-participation in rural development projects, as a basis for improving project success. The study was qualitative in nature, taking the form of a desk research that reviewed secondary data from various journal articles that were purposively selected based on the research theme. Document review was the main data collection method while data analysis was done using content analysis and thematic analysis. Environmental, socio-cultural, political, economic and structural challenges were found to be impeding stakeholder-participation in rural development projects; thereby making the projects fail to attain their objectives and leading to wastage of the very scarce resources that rural development projects are meant to prudently manage. This study concluded that challenges that face stakeholder-participation in projects need to not only be comprehensively understood, but also addressed in order to ensure project success.