Assessment of the influencing factors and effects of using building under construction in jimma city

Abstract

The temporary nature of building construction projects indicates a definite beginning and ending time. In Ethiopia the current situation of the building construction projects does not perform as expected especially with respect to running the project with the sequential phases of construction of the project characteristics. Ethiopia has thus ratified Ethiopian building proclamation No.624, 2009 not to use building under construction before it has been inspected and ensured. This is so hence, using building under construction have high effect on project cost, time & quality of construction, impact on the safety of workers and end users of the working environments. However, there is increasing trend of challenge in running the construction and operation phases parallelly. This study therefore, aims to assess the influencing factors and effects of using building under construction in case of Jimma city; which is limited to building constructions only. The study examines the practice on the influencing factors, social effect, and economic effect as well as rank the effects on the participant bodies of using building under construction through literature review, questionnaires and interview. Explanatory analysis was used to summarize and interpret the data by using MS-excel. The data analyzed was calculated using relative importance index (RII) accounting cost under estimation, financial difficulties by client, stakeholder’s inexperience, inappropriate government policies and unfavorable contract clauses/agreement as independent variables and influencing factors and effect of using building under construction as dependent variables. Accordingly, the findings indicate that the most frequent influencing factors to use building under construction in Jimma city ranked as: political influences, source of income for government in the form of taxation, bribery corruption, decreasing unemployment rate, source of revenue for the employee of the organization, inflation in the cost of construction materials, non-involvement of consultant for design and supervision and tender document preparation, attractive pressure on owner by increase source of revenue for the owner/client of the building, solving the scarcity of commercial center in the city and or needs of building, and source of revenue for the organization use the building. On the other hand, the negative social and economic effects of using building under construction ranked as; increased traffic flow, high noise generation, increased rate of accident onsite, air pollution dust, overcrowded site so difficult to manage materials on site and material on site are exposed to theft led to additional cost, high cost of accident on work force of the industry plus public who uses the service, decrease the productivity of employee of organizations because of disturbance on site, were identified from the finding. The study recommended that mainly the government or regulatory bodies should practice the role and regulation of construction legality accordingly. Consultant and supervisor should be assigned to follow up each construction projects to upgrade the knowledge in order to improve the culture of construction projects in Jimma City with respect to special considerations undertaken in the future projects.