Risk is commonly defined as the possibility of loss, injury, disadvantages or destruction. Risk arises when uncertainty has the potential to affect objectives. The Association of Project Management defined risk as “Any uncertain event or set of circumstances that, should it occur, would influence one or more objectives” Adequate public health project management and administration, relating to prudent and efficient project risk management is mostly overlooked in health sector, but it an important issue because of this huge outlay. Project Risks in public health projects can lead to loss of resources and more importantly, it has impact on the quality of services timeliness and om over all expected results if not prevented. Although there is traditional way of handling project risks in health sector, the lack of prudent understanding of project risks and their management poses significant threats to efficiency and performance of public health projects, including donor funded health projects. This study was conducted with the objective of assessing the practice of project risk management in the health sector, in the case of donor funded health projects. It was cross-sectional qualitative and quantitative study design that utilized census of 155 study subjects that are working in donor-funded projects. Quantitate data collected was analyzed by SPSS 20 and Microsoft excel and qualitative data collected was be coded and analyzed with Microsoft excel. The study identified chief directors were the major decision makers in the management of project risks and the role of Project managers was minimal. Additionally, based on the responses from study participants there was no organized project risk management process in the projects among 96 (63) % participants. About project risk assessment process, 112 (73.3%) of study participants finds it was difficult to identify main risk for their projects and only, 16(10.5%) are able to identify the main risk types for their projects. Out of the 16 who said who can identify the main types of risks for their projects, nearly half of them, 8(47.4%) said they are able to estimate or identify the likelihood of risk occurring for their project and out of these 8 individual who are able to estimate likelihood of risk occurring, only 1 (10.5%) is able impact of risks to their project. On the major risk areas that occur in the health sector Competing priorities from Government side, Political risk (Public unrest & instability), Geographical & weather challenges Inadequate Situational analysis to formulate project goals and objective and difference in work culture & values between stakeholders was the top five project risks identified with their mean probability of occurrences. The study concluded that the practice of project risk management in the health sector is sub optimal and It recommends among others, training and professional development staff and effective monitoring of public health projects and series attention of decision and policy makers.

Keywords: health sector, public health, Risk, Management, risk assessment process