A Study on Critical Factors Affecting Public Infrastructures Project Performance in Ethiopia

It has been demonstrated that the construction industry can be characterized by inefficient and ineffective service delivery. The main goal of this paper is to examine the critical causal factors affecting public infrastructures projects performance in Ethiopia in order to improve the industry’s service delivery. Based on the 58 factors compiled through the analysis of existing theories and investigations, we prepared and distributed 700 structured survey questionnaires for professionals in the construction industry of Ethiopia; and received 578 (82.57 %) of them. The results from an extended statistical analysis on the collected data revealed that the top 8 critical specific factors affecting government-financed infrastructures projects performance in the Ethiopia comprehends: poor project planning & administration system, weak project management leadership skills & institutional capacity, inadequate project design, escalation of construction materials price, lack of integrated project planning system among parties, inadequate capacity of the contractor, poor project schedule and cost management system. The study has an implication for construction industry practitioners, government officials, and research fellows. Introduction Through promoting infrastructures investments, create job opportunities, and deeds as a major consumer of intermediate products, and related services from another business sector via its complex value chain; Construction Industry acts as an engine for socio-economic development of a nation[1, 2] [3-5]. However, the sector is troubled with numerous internal and external factors that hamper the productivity of the industry across the world. The critical of them include: its complex nature, ever regulation change ,unreliable contractor, high insurance cost, technology adoption limitation, management aspect, market price change, inadequate capacity both in finance and technique, labor shortages, stagnant productivity level and failing to delivery project as the intended time, cost and quality standards are belongs to the most constraints of this sector [6]. Consequently, nowadays, a construction project is characterized by inefficient and ineffective project delivery globally[7-11]. Due to the presence of varied underlying problems which affect industry productivity, the sector is characterized by underperformance [12-13]. Previous studies clarified diverse factors affecting the performance of the construction industry. Though, due to the rapid changes in everything in this world, there is still a wide gap to thoroughly understand the underlying problems caused by the underperformance of this sector [5, 14]. Ethiopia has no exception regarding problems associated with the construction industry performance. As the case in Ethiopia, conflict among project participants, the project manager’s ignorance and lack of knowledge and poor human resource management are the top factors hindering the schedule performance of public projects[15]. It is also suggested that due to less emphasis to planning, failure to update schedule on time, poor contract management, poor site supervision, inflation price of construction materials, change order, delayed payments, schedule overrun, quality defect cost overrun, capacity problems, weak organization, and coordination failing public infrastructures projects execution in Ethiopia suffer from performance failure[16, 17]. The mystery behind these chronic problems from global perspectives to local (the case in Ethiopia) enthused me to International Conference on Advanced Education, Management and Humanities (AEMH 2019) Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 352