Roselyn W. Gakure

The Contribution of Human Resource Management Practices to Financial Challenges of Local Authorities in Service Delivery in Kenya

The purpose of this research was to investigate the phenomenon of financial challenges facing local Authorities in Kenya. The presence of financial challenges in local Authorities leads to poor service delivery and makes a local authority not to meet its mandate. Poor service delivery has its consequences which include a growing dissatis- faction of the community. Financial challenges in local Authorities exist in various forms. For instance local Authorities are often unable to pay current liabilities such as salaries and short term obligation to creditors. In order to meet their short term financial obligations they are forced to operate on overdrafts with high interest rates. The study draws attention to human resource factors that may contribute to financial challenges in local Authorities in Kenya with the aim of establishing a body of knowledge that will be critical to researchers and become essential administrative manual of advising County Governments and Governors to mitigate against identified factors causing financial distress in local Authorities. The study population comprises of the 175 Local Authorities in Kenya. A descriptive research design was used to conduct the study in 175 local Authorities in Kenya. A sample of 20 Local Authorities was selected using a stratified systematic sampling technique. A questionnaire was used to collect data from both the Local Authorities officers and customers to these Local Au- thorities. The data collected was analyzed using descriptive statistics. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) was employed to study the causal relationships among all the variables in the model. In order to identify whether significant difference exist among the three categories of financially distressed local Authorities, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used. Qualitative responses were analyzed using content analysis. The analysis was done using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS 17.0) software. The findings were presented in form of bar graphs, pie charts, reports to mention but a few. Results indicated that the cause of financial distress include poor human resource management practices (69.3%). In addition, hu- man resource management practices were found to have a negative and significant relationship with financial distress. The study recommends that best practices in the area of human resource management need to be considered as measures of addressing financial distress of local Authorities