The Portfolio Behaviour of Employment-Based Cooperative Thrift and Credit Societies

Among the financial institutions in the informal system is the cooperative thrift and credit society which is highly prone to failure. However, some of the successful CTCS coops are employmentbased. This paper studies the determinants behind their growth and sustenance in the process of building their portfolio. The paper adopts the primary method of data gathering where 222 coop thrift officials covering 14 organisations were served with the questionnaires. 178 questionnaires were retrieved and analysed. This represented a retrieval rate of 78%. The main variables used to estimate the outputs were loans size, portfolio size and growth as dependent variables while the independent variables were, average savings, membership strength, loan access and portfolio growth other deposits from members. The techniques adopted were the ordinary least squares (OLS) and the Two stage least square (2SLS) regressions. The results indicate that membership strength is significant across the different regressions as well as supporting finance from deposits of members and other sources such as loans. The paper recommends that this type coop should be engrafted into the mainstream workplace and financial institutions and more of this type of coops should be encouraged in the system