Effect of Agricultural Cooperative Membership on Women Income Generation in Niger State, Nigeria.

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to determine the effects of agricultural cooperative membership on income generation by women in Niger State of Nigeria. A total of 110 respondents were randomly selected for the study, data for the study were obtained through a structured interview schedule and analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics. The results showed that majority (70.9%) of the respondents were still in their active age; 72.7% of the women had one form of education or the other. A large proportion (90.0%) of the women were married and majority (74.5%) had moderate household size of between 6-10 people. Also 57.3% of the respondents belonged to thrift and credit types of cooperative societies, and only 38.2% longed to multi-purpose cooperative societies. The major benefit derived by the respondents for participating in cooperatives was for receiving assistance from governments, NGOs, donor agencies, and having access to loans or credits (44.5%). The results also showed a significant difference between the income of women (N69187.27) after participation in cooperative societies and before participation (N31025.45), which implied that women participants had greater income. Also, women faced several constraints in participating in cooperative societies. The major constraints were: religion beliefs, inadequate knowledge about cooperatives and complicated administrative procedure which ranked 1st, 2nd and 3rd respectively. Regression estimates results showed that household size and year of cooperative membership were significant at 1% and farm size at 10% level of probability. It was recommended that women should be persuaded to be more active in agricultural cooperative activities,, and the bureaucratic bottlenecks in the formation and registration of women cooperatives should be removed.