An Assessment of the Universal Service Fund: A Case of Public Schools in Kiambu County

A Research Project Report Submitted to the Chandaria School of Business in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Business Administration (MBA)The purpose for this research was to assess the implementation of the USF program in Kenya by Communications Authority of Kenya while establishing the benefits of the fund to Kenyans. The research was guided by the following objectives: to assess the benefits derived from the Implementation of USF, to determine the challenges affecting USF implementation and to identify the strategies key to successful USF implementation. The research design adopted was descriptive research design and both Quantitative and qualitative analysis was employed to measure the frequency and magnitude of the various factors. The population of the study comprised of 89,065 public secondary schools students, 3,479 teachers from Kiambu County and 17 top management of the Communications Authority of Kenya. A sample of 47 students, 20 teachers from the public secondary schools 2 top management of CA was selected from the population. Questionnaires and interviews were conducted for the purpose of data collection. The particular descriptive statistics comprised of percentages, means and standard deviation while the inferential statistics used was correlation and reliability analysis. The findings showed that majority of the students seemed to agree that USF increases computer literacy levels, however a good number seemed to disagree with the fact that “USF provides enhanced community broadband networks” due to the high standard deviation value which shows a bigger variety of opinion among the respondents. On average most of the respondents agreed to have benefited from USF implementation. On average, the teachers were not certain about the following benefits, USF transforming Kiambu County into a knowledge-based society. The findings also disclosed that “Bureaucratic systems of governance and lack of qualified or interested vendors to bid for the projects would affect the implementation greatly. On average however, the students agreed that the various stated challenges would affect the implementation of USF. Majority of the teachers strongly agreed that insufficient funds hindered the full implementation of USF. However, on average they all agreed that the stated challenges were affecting the implementation of USF in Kiambu County. Further results indicated that USF should provide disburse the funds in a transparent manner and fund appropriate projects, the results also showed that USF should engage aggressively in promotion of broadband services nationally. The study concluded that the implementation of USF in Kiambu County was beneficial. More importantly both the teachers and students highlighted the provision of expanded mobile network, increased number of computer literacy levels, easy and reliable access to information superhighway as some of the major benefits. The study recommends that the USF to advocate for strengthening of government ICT policies, shift some of the branches to promote broadband internet services in rural areas, provide disbursement of funds in a transparent manner to fund the appropriate projects, allow for growth of vendors so that there is enough number when bidding for the projects and track accelerated deployment of the broadband services to be adopted for successful implementation of the USF program