ASSESSMENT OF THE IMPACT OF WARD DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS ON GRASSROOTS DEVELOPMENT IN KONTAGORA AND MAGAMA LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREAS, NIGER STATE
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Date
2021
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Abstract
The study examined the extent to which Ward Development Projects impacted on grassroots
development in the two areas under study. The study made use of interviews, observations,
questionnaire and official documents of government relating to the ward development policy to
obtain primary data necessary for the study. Secondary data were derived from text books, annual
reports, journals, and newspapers, published and unpublished articles. Evaluation Theory of
Edward Suchman was used as a theoretical framework to provide us with the baseline discussion
for the theme of the study. As a result of the study, we found out that ward development projects
recorded very little success in the area of enhancing community participation especially as a result
of inadequate representation of the wards and absence of democratic principle in the process of
constituting ward development projects committee members though significantly improved the
provision of infrastructural facilities such as feeder roads, dispensaries, primary education
facilities, water supply and electricity. It further revealed that the policy was not able to sustain
local development projects especially as a result of failure to incorporate community members at
the planning stage as well as lacked of self-sustain structures within the communities. We
recommended that Ward Development Projects Committee members should be increased to
commensurate with the number of polling units in each ward and that people should be given free
hands to choose the Ward Committee members of their choices. Furthermore, Niger state
government should continue with the ward development projects policy and that members of the
community should be incorporated in planning along with the creation of self-sustain structure for
the maintenance of local development projects.