Cooperative Society Membership : An Impact Assessment of Smallholder Farms and Agro Business Owners

Cooperative societies have been advocated for decades as one of the possible avenues for solving the teething problems being encountered by small scale businesses which constitute the largest employers of labor in Nigeria. This paper represents an attempt to assess first, the situation as it affects small business units and then assess the impact of the cooperatives on their members in terms of benefits derived and their awareness and utilization of these benefits to solve their business problems. The study design was based on a survey of sixty (60) respondents (agro-business people) in two Agricultural Development Programme ( Anambra State) contact groups in Utu and Ukpor towns. The questionnaire was the main instrument used in the study. Statistics used were the Spearman’s Rho for the ranked data and the Paired sample T-test statistics for test of means. These yielded the following: A ranked correlation of 0.94 which was significant with a value of sig. (2-tailed value 0.129). Since this is greater than .05, it suggests a strong communality of the perception of the problems of both members and non-members of cooperatives. There was no significant difference between the perception, awareness and knowledge of the respondents in the two groups. Also, the T-test of paired samples further supported this in terms of ability of members to source credit. The significant value was high (sig. (2-tailed) value > 0.05 and confidence level contained a zero, suggesting that there was no significant differences between the means. Also data from the survey revealed that the most important source for credit obtained by both groups still remained the ESUSU (traditional). It was recommended that greater attention be paid to the structuring, supervision and management of the cooperatives by the registrars of cooperatives, government and members of the cooperatives. In addition, government policy makers and agencies executing such policies must address the problems of cooperatives by positive action such as that executed in the banking and financial sector to get the sector working as envisaged. In this regards, the modern banking and financial sector must be made to play the role it was designed to play so that the sourcing of credit can be shifted from the traditional to modern financial sector