KEY MANAGEMENT AND INFRASTRUCTURAL REQUIREMENTS FOR INDUSTRIAL AND SERVICE PROJECTS IN KENYA

Many underdeveloped countries, Kenya included aspire to be industrialized so as to minimize existing problems such as poverty, ignorance, disease, insecurity, and overpopulation. Other reasons for Kenya’s industrialization are occasioned by the fact that it is mainly an agricultural country whose production in this sector e.g., tea, coffee, etc. are exported in raw form or semi-processed forms fetching less income compared to manufactured products because of fluctuations in prices of such commodities in both domestic and international markets. Thus, to paraphrase, Gunnar Myrdal (1996), manufacturing industry represents a higher stage of production. In developed countries and Newly Industrializing Countries, manufacturing industry has been at the core of such countries’ rapid economic growth and development and rise in the living standards of their people. Equally, productivity of human resource working in the industrial/service sectors is higher than those working in traditional agriculture. Thus, it is important to modernize traditional agriculture in Kenya in order to enhance productivity. In countries like Japan, China, India, Malaysia, Nigeria, South Africa, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, etc with high ratio of population to natural resources, especially land, manufacturing industry represents great hope and potential for increasing labour productivity and raising the standards of living. Hence, the need for Kenya to change her development priority from what can be called one or two crop economy to put more emphasis on industrialization or high value- added activities which are bound to continually raise national income per capita. However, given the complexity of medium and large scale industrial and service-oriented projects their development, implementation, and management demands that they be sound economically, technically, financially and managerially in order to avoid failure and wastage of scarce resources. The purpose of this paper is to bring out important elements of sound aforesaid management aspects regarding industrial and service oriented projects aimed at rapid industrialization in Kenya