What Drives Project Delivery.....

A survey of 46 local NGOs suggests that planning capacity matters more than funding, communication or monitoring taken one at a time.

Key findings

• Planning was the only factor that independently predicted effective project implementation.
• Communication, financing, and monitoring and controlling each correlate with success, but the factors overlap heavily: about three-quarters of the explained variance is shared between them.
• Legal and regulatory conditions change how communication and planning work. Socio-cultural conditions showed no significant effect.
• Managers rate their own delivery very highly. The weakest spot is feedback from beneficiaries and donors.

Why this matters

Yemen remains one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises. At the time of the study, 20.7 million people, about 66% of the population, needed humanitarian assistance (OCHA, 2021). Local NGOs sit at the centre of the response, yet very little research examines how well they implement projects or why some do it better than others. This article summarises a study that set out to answer that question in Taiz governorate.

Background: local NGOs in a fragile state

Yemen’s civil society has repeatedly expanded when the state has weakened. Civil society organisations flourished during the 1962 revolution and again after unification in 1994, partly to compensate for the breakdown of the state, and by 2015 more than 13,000 organisations were registered with the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, a 24% increase on the post-2011 level (Alwazir, 2015). Critics argue that this growth made the sector donor-driven and accountable more to funders than to the communities it serves (Alwazir, 2015). Since the conflict escalated, the humanitarian operation has become a large coordinated effort: in 2018, 254 international and national partners coordinated assistance across Yemen’s 22 governorates (United Nations in Yemen, n.d.).

The sector works under heavy constraints. In 2015 the Ministry suspended government support to 85% of registered organisations, many of which already had weak institutional and managerial capacity (Al-Duqaimi, 2016). Leadership styles and organisational cultures have been described as poorly matched to a turbulent environment (Sarakbi, 2019), and accountability practices in local NGOs are applied only moderately, with reports of fraud and misuse of relief funds (Ahmed, 2020). UN humanitarian appeals for Yemen have received only part of the funds requested (Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, 2018).

Comparative evidence from other developing countries points to a structural problem. Funding is dominated by UN agencies and international NGOs, local NGOs often see themselves as implementers rather than partners, and donors hesitate to fund them directly because of capacity and corruption concerns (Batti, 2017; Chowdhury et al., 2020; Ismail, 2019).

The risk landscape

Risks to implementation come from both outside and inside the organisation.

External risks. Insecurity, and how it is managed, shapes whether aid reaches people: in the 2015 response, weak security management limited access (Cunningham, 2016). Multiple armed parties run competing systems for aid distribution, and local volunteers have had to negotiate passage through competing armed checkpoints (Kimball & Jumaan, 2020). Authorities can also deny access or force goods as the price of access (Bahadory et al., 2019). One of the few Yemen-specific risk studies, a literature-based review of oil and gas construction projects, identified 51 critical risk factors. They span internal sources, such as client, contractor and consultant issues, and external sources: political, national economic, environmental and safety, local community, security, and force majeure (Kassem et al., 2021).

Internal risks. Project management capacity is the recurring weak point. In Yemen, project managers’ competencies strongly influence the success of development projects (Al-Matari, 2019). Elsewhere, an early survey of European Commission humanitarian partners found that only 4.5% used project management tools systematically (Bugnion, 2002). A large international survey of NGO project managers found uneven adoption of project management tools, with better project performance among NGOs that adopted them more widely (Golini et al., 2015). Local NGO projects in Botswana and Ethiopia were also found to be weakly monitored, often without baseline data or expertise (Beyene, 2016; Mark, 2007).

What the literature predicted. Communication supports success throughout the project cycle (Wamalwa & James, 2018; Zulch, 2014), and planning is consistently linked to performance (Naeem et al., 2018; Nyanje & Wanyoike, 2016). Evidence on funding is mixed. Lack of funds hurts performance (Anunda, 2016), yet prompt release of funds did not predict timely completion in one Kenyan study (Gaturu & Muturi, 2014). Regular monitoring and evaluation is linked to timeliness and performance (Gaturu & Muturi, 2014; Kitur, 2017), although local NGOs often struggle to resource it (Clough, 2018). Yemen-specific evidence on all of this is thin, which is the gap this study addresses.

The study

The study surveyed managers of local NGOs in Taiz between March and April 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, so the questionnaire went out by email and WhatsApp. Of 66 active local NGOs, 56 were approached and 46 returned complete responses, an 82% response rate. Four factors were measured with five items each on a five-point scale: communication, planning, financing, and monitoring and controlling. The items were adapted from a Kenyan NGO study (Nyanje & Wanyoike, 2016). The outcome, effective project implementation, covered quality, delivery, sustainability of benefits, time and budget. The full 25-item instrument was reliable (Cronbach’s alpha = .905). The analysis used descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations and multiple regression, with legal and socio-cultural conditions tested as moderating factors.

All respondents worked in local NGOs. About 70% were men and 63% were in top management. Relief and humanitarian work (67%), education (63%), human rights (63%) and health (59%) were the most common fields. Organisations were young: 44% had operated for five years or less. A quarter ran more than 20 projects a year, while 37% had only one to five project staff.

What managers reported

Factor M (1–5) SD

Effective project implementation 4.49 0.41

Monitoring and controlling 4.20 0.59

Communication 3.95 0.78

Financing 3.90 0.70

Planning 3.90 0.82

Note. N = 46. Scores are means on a five-point scale.

Managers rated their own delivery very highly. Quality scored 4.70, and time and budget delivery both scored 4.37. Some 72% said they faced no difficulty completing projects on time and within resources, while 28% (13 organisations) did.

The weak spots were specific. Feedback to and from beneficiaries, staff and donors was the lowest-scoring communication item (M = 3.52). Ease of project staffing was the lowest planning item (M = 3.65). On financing, respondents agreed that funding had limited the scope of their projects (M = 4.02), and sponsor evaluation of return on investment was the lowest financing item (M = 3.63).

Perceptions of importance were even stronger. When asked to rate each factor’s importance, financing came first (M = 4.89), followed by monitoring and controlling (4.78), planning (4.74) and communication (4.50). When forced to choose one critical factor, 43.5% chose planning and 34.8% chose financing, against 13.0% for communication and 8.7% for monitoring and controlling.

On the operating environment, 82.6% pointed to legal approval of project agreements as the main legal factor, ahead of health and safety (56.5%) and equal opportunities (50.0%). Among socio-cultural factors, population growth (56.5%) and community literacy (52.2%) led.

What predicts effective implementation

Correlations. All four factors were positively and significantly related to effective implementation: planning (r = .71), financing (r = .57), monitoring and controlling (r = .48) and communication (r = .43), all p < .01.

Regression. Together the four factors explained 54.9% of the variation in implementation (R² = .549, adjusted R² = .505; F(4, 41) = 12.48, p < .001). Only planning was independently significant (B = 0.241, β = .484, p = .003). In plain terms, each one-point rise in an NGO’s planning score was associated with roughly a quarter-point rise in its implementation score, holding the other factors constant. Communication (β = .083, p = .548), financing (β = .216, p = .141) and monitoring and controlling (β = .104, p = .448) were not significant once planning was accounted for.

The variance breakdown is the most useful result. The four factors together uniquely explained only 14.2% of the variation, with planning alone accounting for 10.7%. Another 40.7% was shared across the factors. The factors move together, so a well-planned project also tends to be well financed, well monitored and well communicated. Financing matters on its own terms (r = .57), but its effect largely overlaps with planning (r = .59 between the two).

Legal and socio-cultural conditions. With legal factors added to the model, communication and planning both had significant effects (p = .038 and p < .001), while financing and monitoring did not. The interaction terms were significant for both, but in opposite directions (legal × communication, B = 0.113, p = .040; legal × planning, B = −0.164, p = .005). Legal considerations appeared to strengthen the role of communication and to narrow planning’s advantage. That fits a setting where approvals, negotiation and stakeholder relations with authorities decide whether projects proceed (Bahadory et al., 2019). Given the sample size, treat this as suggestive rather than conclusive. Socio-cultural conditions showed no significant moderating effects, though planning came close (p = .070).

What this means

• Invest in planning first. Realistic scope, schedule and budget estimates, risk assessment at the design stage, and competent, trained project managers are where the evidence points (Al-Matari, 2019; Naeem et al., 2018).
• Treat the functions as a system. No single function stands alone. Strengthening planning while neglecting monitoring, communication or funding discipline wastes much of the gain.
• Plan for the legal environment. Since legal approval of agreements was the top legal concern, build authority engagement and realistic communication plans into project design.
• Diversify funding and build accountability. Dependence on shifting donor priorities can pull NGOs away from their own agendas (Parks, 2008), while training, consultancy and publications can generate local income (Antrobus, 1987). Donors, for their part, can make longer-term commitments to organisations with a proven record (Antrobus, 1987; Batti, 2017).
• Ask what monitoring is for. Monitoring scored high yet did not independently predict success. That raises the question of whether it is used for decisions or mainly for donor reporting (Clough, 2018).

Limits

This is a single-governorate survey of 46 respondents, most of them senior managers rating their own organisations. Outcome scores clustered near the top of the scale, which leaves little variation to explain, and the data date from 2020. Larger, multi-governorate studies that add independent performance data would test whether these patterns hold.

The full study is available on request.

About the Author

Mazen Ahmed A. Saif completed this research as part of his Master of Business Administration at Open University Malaysia in 2021. The study was conducted in Taiz governorate, Yemen, with the support of local NGO managers and the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation. Key findings from this research were published by the author under the title: "Factors Affecting the Effective Implementation of Local NGO Projects in Yemen," published in the International Journal of Science & Engineering Development Research (IJSDR), Vol. 8, Issue 5, May 2023.

Full Study Link:

http://www.ijsdr.org/papers/IJSDR2305375.pdf

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