Social Accountability and Public Service Delivery in Kenya: A Case Study of Baringo County, Kenya

Social accountability is one of the corporate governance practices that is expected to be undertaken by organisations. Within the public sector, social accountability is an emerging phenomenon that involves citizens’ involvement in advocating for their rights, good governance, prudent use of public resources and transparency in all public projects. This paper examines the linkages between social accountability and the delivery of public services with specific reference to Baringo County, Kenya. The study was anchored on agency theory. A concurrent triangulation research design was used, which targeted a total of 666,763 residents from Baringo County and 6 sub-county administrators. A sample size of 384 respondents was selected through stratified and simple random sampling techniques. The six sub-county administrators were chosen through purposive sampling methods. Data was collected using questionnaires and interviews. Analysis of data was performed using descriptive and inferential statistics with the help of SPSS Version 24.0. The research established that social accountability had a weak positive relationship with service delivery at Baringo County (r=0.403, p<0.05). It was concluded that social accountability practices influenced the delivery of public services by the County Government of Baringo to a lower level. It is therefore recommended that members of the public need to be fully educated on conducting social audits. The county government of Baringo should develop a public participation and social accountability framework to enable residents to check and assess various developmental programmes being undertaken in their county