Evaluation of Public Private Partnership Strategies on Concession Performance: Case of Rift Valley Railways Concession, Kenya.

Abstract

Nations worldwide face fiscal constraints resulting to infrastructure deficits.  Kenya, like most of others has increasingly turned to PPP to cover infrastructure gap. PPPs encourage private initiative and benefit from the involvement of the private sector particularly in the designing, building, financing, operating and maintenance of infrastructure projects. Different types of PPPs have been practiced in worldwide infrastructure development with diverse results and a variety of problems have been encountered. As an urgent need to establish the strategies best suited to improve practices in future PPP projects and the performance of existing ones, as an important step toward the development of such a protocol this study set out to evaluate the PPP strategies deemed to have the highest impact on SSA railways on the performance of RVR concession in Kenya. It is based on Johnson and Scholes (1993) model of strategy evaluation i.e. suitability, acceptability and feasibility. The package contained four strategies; namely, Risk Allocation Strategy, Sound Finance Strategy, Strong Consortium Strategy and Technology Strategy. By employing descriptive research design, the study survey realized response rate was 76% and deemed viable for analysis. Mean score ranking gave the strategies in the following order of importance in their effect on RVR concession; (1) Strong Consortium Strategy (2) Sound Finance Strategy (3) Risk Allocation Strategy and (4) Technology Strategy. Cronbach's Alpha was 0.875, suggesting that the test scores had relatively high internal consistency and therefore reliable.

Key Words: Public Private Partnership Strategies, Concession Performance, Rift Valley Railways.