Socio-economic determinants of cooperative societies’ access to the services of the Nigerian Agricultural Cooperative and Rural Development Bank

This paper assesses the extent to which cooperative societies had access to the special intervention fund administered by the Nigerian Agricultural Cooperative And Rural Development Bank (NACRDB) Ltd. The study was carried out between March and September, 2005, on six randomly selected states, one from each of the six geopolitical zones into which Nigeria has been divided. States sampled included Enugu (South-East). Rivers (South-South), Ondo (South West), Benue (North Central), Bauchi (North East) and Kano (North West). Sixty cooperative societies were also randomly selected for the study from each state covered; thirty of them with access and thirty without access to the intervention fund, on the whole 360 cooperative societies were studied. Statistical tools used for data analysis included percentage, means and range. Levene’s test for equality of means was used to determine if the means of the two categories of cooperatives (those with access and those without) were statistically different. Likert scale rating was used to determine cooperative societies’ perception of the effects of agency operational guidelines on access. The Levene’s test for equality of means showed that the difference between the means of the two categories of cooperative societies were statistically significant at 5% probability level. Likert scale rating confirmed that the operational guidelines of NACRDB such as minimum credit requirement, type of crop grown, approved loan size, and insurance cover affected access to the intervention fund. It was recommended that promoters of cooperative societies should pay adequate attention to the socioeconomic characteristics of the cooperative societies so promoted and the credit guidelines of the NACRDB Ltd