EFFECT OF SUPPLIER COLLABORATION ON PROCUREMENT PERFORMANCE OF COUNTY GOVERNMENTS IN THE UPPER EASTERN REGION, KENYA
EFFECT OF SUPPLIER COLLABORATION ON PROCUREMENT PERFORMANCE OF COUNTY GOVERNMENTS IN THE UPPER EASTERN REGION, KENYA
Joan Jeruiyot Chemweno - Master of Science in Procurement and Logistics Management, Department of Business Administration, Tharaka University, Kenya
Dr. Reuben Musyoka Mwove (PhD) - Department of Business Administration, Tharaka University, Kenya
Dr. Collins Sitienei (PhD) - Department of Business Administration, Tharaka University, Kenya
ABSTRACT
County governments in Kenya continue to face persistent procurement inefficiencies despite the enactment of the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act (2015), with the Office of the Auditor-General (2024) reporting billions of shillings in procurement irregularities across several devolved units, a pattern corroborated by the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (2025) in its most recent compliance review. Supplier collaboration, understood as a strategic partnership in which buyers and suppliers share information, jointly plan activities, participate in problem-solving and jointly manage risk, has been advanced as a mechanism for improving procurement outcomes, yet empirical evidence from devolved government contexts in Sub-Saharan Africa remains scarce. This study examined the effect of supplier collaboration on procurement performance of county governments in the Upper Eastern Region of Kenya, comprising Meru, Tharaka Nithi, Embu, Isiolo and Marsabit counties. The study was anchored on the Resource-Based View, the Relational View, Social Exchange Theory and Transaction Cost Economics, and adopted a cross-sectional descriptive research design. A census of 296 respondents comprising procurement officers, heads of supply chain management and strategic suppliers was targeted, yielding 285 usable responses (96.28% response rate). Data were collected using a structured, five-point Likert-scale questionnaire and analysed using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation and simple linear regression in SPSS version 29.0. The supplier collaboration construct returned a Cronbach's alpha of 0.710, confirming internal consistency, in line with the threshold recommended by Taber (2022) and Nunnally and Bernstein as updated by Hair et al. (2022). Descriptive results indicated that supplier collaboration was strongly practised (grand mean = 4.27, SD = 0.69), with information sharing rated highest. Correlation analysis revealed a positive, statistically significant association between supplier collaboration and procurement performance (r = 0.137, p = 0.021), and regression results confirmed that supplier collaboration significantly and positively predicted procurement performance (β = 0.159, t = 2.325, p = 0.021), explaining 1.9 percent of the variance (R² = 0.019, F = 5.408, p = 0.021). The null hypothesis of no effect was therefore rejected. The study concludes that although modest in explanatory power on its own, supplier collaboration makes a statistically significant contribution to procurement performance in devolved government settings, and recommends that county governments institutionalise structured information-sharing platforms, joint planning forums and collaborative risk-management mechanisms with suppliers to strengthen procurement outcomes.
