Abstract:
Community development has remained one of the major preoccupations of various governments all over the world. In Nigeria, the rural areas, which constitute over 70% of the country’s population and largely made up of poor people, lack the basic infrastructural amenities required to meet basic human needs. Consequently, government efforts over the years have been directed at how to provide local communities with basic infrastructure as a means of ameliorating their conditions in order to enhance self-reliance, increased productivity, higher income, enhanced political participation, provision of social services and promotion of economic growth. Since the efforts of various Nigerian government regimes still fall short of achieving the desired developmental objectives in this regard, the World Bank has been assisting her under various programmes, to grapple with problems of poverty, unemployment, infrastructural development, and paucity of social services. One of such programmes is the Local Empowerment and Environmental Management Project (LEEMP). This study evaluated the efforts of the LEEMP on community development in Enugu State from 2004-2009 with a view to appraising the level of performance achieved by LEEMP’s projects on community development in Enugu state; the factors responsible for that level of performance; and to proffer recommendations for improving LEEMP’s development efforts in the State. Data for the study were generated from both primary and secondary sources. The primary sources comprised of data generated from questionnaires, interviews and observation of the 81 projects located in 77 communities in the state. From the sampled communities 2321 respondents were selected using a combination of the stratified, purposive and simple random sampling techniques to cover the various strata of the communities. The secondary data comprised of information collected from LEEMP working papers, books, journals, government publications and the Internet. The Statistical Packages for Social Science in Windows (SPSS WIN) version 15 using means, graphs, chi-square and t-test was employed in the data analysis. The findings of the study revealed that the level of performance achieved by LEEMP’s projects in Enugu state was significant on all areas the intervention intended to affect the host communities. The study also revealed that certain identifiable factors such as level of community cooperation and participation, project funding, project personnel, intervention context, project relevance to felt community needs, and favourable pre-intervention conditions contributed significantly to the various project outcomes. Based on the findings of the research, the study recommended that some variables such as enhanced community cooperation and participation, adequate funding of projects, employment of dedicated project personnel, enhanced intervention context, project relevance to felt community needs, and favourable pre-intervention conditions will significantly enhance project outcome if they are positively managed.
