INVESTIGATION OF THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF CO-OPERATIVE SOCIETIES TO HOUSING PROVISION IN OGUN STATE, NIGERIA

The New National Housing and Urban Development policy (2002) identified housing co-operatives as part of a sustainable delivery framework for the housing sector through which new housing units could be provided. However, there is a lack of understanding of the contributions of co-operatives to housing provision in past years. The study, therefore, investigated the contributions of co-operatives to housing provision in Ogun State in a bid to improve the performance of various strategies of housing provision through co-operatives in Nigeria. The study is in tandem with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015 to ensure access to adequate, safe, and affordable housing for all by the year 2030. The research involved the administration of structured questionnaires to the fifty-two (52) Presidents and 418 members of co-operatives involved in housing provision activities in the study area, using both purposive and proportionate sampling method. The analyses of the data were done with the use of frequency and percentage distributions, mean score, standard deviation, Kruskal-Wallis test, analysis of variance (ANOVA), Spearman Correlation, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and Categorical Regression (CATREG) analysis. The findings of this study imply that cooperatives involved in housing provision in the study area contribute to housing delivery mainly through improving members’ access to key housing inputs, such as land, building materials, and housing finance rather than engaging in the actual construction of housing units. This study is also instructive in revealing that the contributions of cooperatives to housing delivery can be improved through large and active membership, better management of their resources, and elimination of barriers preventing access to affordable land and building materials in Nigeria