| dc.description.abstract | Sustainable procurement has close connection to sustainable development. It advocates for
acquisition and disposal practices that maximise economy and facilitate economic
development while having little or no negative environmental impacts.However, the
problem is lack of sustainable procurement practices amongst the public entities in Kenya
and for the entities that try to incorporate sustainability within their practices, the extent of
integration still needs some upgrading owing to the fact that only one or two of the
sustainability pillars, economic, environmental, and social, are incorporated instead of the
three. Despite many studies on the concept of sustainable procurement practices, most of the
studies have only focused on one or two of the aspects of the practices. Hence, there is a
need to establish the extent of integration of environmental, economic, and social
sustainable public procurement practices in Kenya from the case study of Lake Victoria
South Water Services Board (LVSWSB). The objectives of the study are to establish the
extent of environmental sustainability, examine the extent of social sustainability, and
determine the extent to which economic sustainability are all integrated within the public
procurement practices at the LVSWSB. On this respect, the conceptual framework looks at
public procurement as the dependent variable and environmental, social, and economic
sustainability aspects as the independent variables. A descriptive survey research design
targeting a population size of 144 participants was used in the study. A total of 106
participants were used as the representative sample. Determination of the adequacy was
based purely on judgment and experience in the said field of study. Through the use of
questionnaires and other secondary sources, the study obtained the required data. In order to
enhance the reliability and validity of the questionnaires, the study performed a test and
retest process. On the item level, the correlations ranged between 0.6 and 0.8. The overall
reliability of total retest scores was 0.84. When stratified by water service providers, subcounty
water officers, LVSWSB contractors, and LVSWSB head office, the total score
reliability approximated 0.80 for all the categories. Based on the results, the study
established that environmental sustainability had a mean of 3.01, economic sustainability
. had a mean of 3.54, and the social sustainability had a mean of 3.67. It means that the extent
of integrating economic and social sustainability is higher than the integration of
environmental sustainability in the board. In this respect, the study recommends that all the
three pillars should be adequately integrated within the procurement process. | en_US |
