Determinants of project success in non-governmental organizations: the case of local based ngo’s poverty alleviation projects in addis ababa, Ethiopia

Abstract

The prime concerns of the donor agencies are to improve the livelihood of the people; despite of their crucial role in poverty alleviation, most nongovernmental organizations have been recorded not successful in terms of completing projects on time within allocated resources and in terms of stated project objective as well. The purpose of this study is to identify the determinants of project success in local based NGO’s. This paper examined project success, Study objectives includes the following to assess how the project planning stage factors affect the project success, how project execution phase factors affect the project success, how project monitoring and evaluation practice affects the project success. The method employed to undertake the study of problem was to utilize descriptive research design; the survey was distributed for 179 project managers and the questionnaires were well filled giving (83.2%) response rate, a pilot study was conducted to test the validity and reliability of the semi structured questionnaire. Data was organized, cleaned and coded for descriptive analysis using SPSS version 23. This paper provides a significant contribution to the local based NGO’s knowledge of project success. The findings of the study revealed that; schedule and cost variance, poor project evaluation practice, ineffective resource utilization, poor resource managing, lack of team competency and poor communication have far worst effect on local based NGO’s poverty alleviation projects. The study recommended that local based NGO’s should work on improving project performance by paying attention to its planning, implementing and controlling practices and using a more advanced and internationally recommended models. Particularly, prepare adequately work breakdown structures with the expected outcomes to reducing project ineffectiveness and inefficiency and avoidance of over optimism is important and diversify resource mobilization that should have various cope up strategies in response to shrinking international donors funding, beside strongly worked on for the improvement of transparency and accountability, increase the level of team competency by providing relevant training programs and boozing proper communication to resolve the issue of project quality, as these factors will delivered high level of successful completion of projects.