Abstract:
In rural community development, community participation is a vital element that ensures and speeds the socio-economic
transformation of people and rural areas. Although, over the years, community participation has received little attention from
the governments in developing countries, NGOs, United Nations and CBOs have actively advocated and supported community
participation, especially in development planning and developing poverty alleviation strategies. This study examined influence
of community participation of CBOs on rural community development in Mwingi, Kenya. The study adopted a mixed-method
research design. The target population of this study comprised of 54 registered water CBOs appearing on the CBO register of
District Development Officer (DDO), Mwingi, Kenya. It adopted stratified random sampling and purposive sampling to
include a sample of 327 respondents. The data collection instrument adopted were questionnaire surveys and interviews to
acquire quantitative and qualitative data. Descriptive statistics in the form of frequencies, percentages, mean, standard
deviation and correlation were adopted to analyze quantitative data. Inferential statistics employed simple linear regression to
test the strength of the relationship between the variables based on observed data and to predict the value of the dependent
variable based on the independent variable. This study established that community participation in community based water
projects had a significant influence on the success of these projects with R=0.549, R2=0.301, β=4.704, t=6.686, F (1,325) =
41.714, p<0.05. These results implied that community participation in community based water projects had a positive
significant influence on the implementation of rural community development in Mwingi. The study concluded that the role of
community participation in community development water projects had positively influenced the implementation of rural
community development in Mwingi, Kitui County, Kenya.
Keywords: Community participation, rural community development, community-based organizations, Kitui County
