ABSTRACT

The sheer number of orphaned and vulnerable children is overwhelming. Many wellmeaning donors are funding orphanages as a solution to the problem. However, orphanages are expensive and can only reach small numbers of children. Research by the World Bank in Kenya for example; found the cost of operating orphanages to be six times higher than the cost of caring for children in the community. While institutions can serve as a temporary and last-resort response for children with no other means of support; they are not a recommended long-term solution. This concept of sustainable project development posits that once the project is launched and begins to generate some type of benefits, it is possible to continue utilizing the same general approaches to allow the project to continue moving forward, supplying those benefits for as long as necessary. Therefore, to bridge this gap we sought to find out the determinants influencing sustainability of orphans related donor funded project of church based organization. The specific objectives that guided this study were; to determine whether financial resources affects sustainability of donor funded orphans related project in church based organizations, to establish how staff training of church based organizations affects sustainability of donor funded orphans related project, to establish how donor policy affects sustainability of donor funded orphans related project in church based organizations, to investigate how the organization structure affect sustainability of donor funded orphans related project in church based organizations and to establish how technology adoption affects sustainability of donor funded orphans related project in church based organizations. The target population composed of 114 project teams. Stratified sampling method was employed to select the respondents. Data was collected through administration of questionnaires. Quantitative and qualitative approach was used in data analysis. .Quantitative approach used descriptive statistics which included frequencies, measures of central tendencies and dispersion and inferential statistics which included regression and analysis of variances. The study found out that a financial resource is keys in Zoe Ministry for its sustainability because everything that runs the project is based on financial resources. Organization structure easily empowers employee where it practiced because the employee feel a sense of trust and belonging. The extent to which donor policies influence project sustainability in the organization was observed to be of very high influence as was cited by majority of the respondents in the study. Technology adoption is considered to very important to determine how work in the organization can be made easier. Finally staff training was also key to employee toward how their carry out their daily activities. The study recommended that Zoe ministry need to adopt financial resources, donor policy and organization structure as they were keys for any project sustainability. Therefore, we can conclude that financial resources, Staff training donor policy technology adoption and organization structure influence sustainability of orphans donor funded project of church based organization in Kenya