KEY DETERMINANTS EXPLAINING DIFFERENCE IN CROSS-COUNTRY PROJECTS PERFORMANCES AMONG IMPLEMENTATION COUNTRIES IN AFRICAN CONTEXT

In the last two decades, there is a significant effort of research in international project management primarily focusing on success factors, but those searches are yet to focus on cross-country projects perspective and moreover to perfectly highlight the root cause of the difference appearing in cross-country' project performance across different settings. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), we shed light on the key determinants that explain the difference in cross-country project performance across countries of implementation. Four main categories of critical success factors for international development, that are the matching of the project goal and real needs of the countries (beneficiaries), the context (politic, legal, social-cultural) of implementation, the level of stakeholder engagement in each country, project managers and project teams' competencies and capabilities in Project management in each country, have been hypothesized as explaining the difference of performance in our theoretical model. However, the final model from the structural equation modeling shows that the level of stakeholder engagement in each country explains more the difference in performance observed among countries, even though the influence of the three other categories is not totally null.