ABSTRACT

Cooperatives have been regarded as one of the main institutional machinery for empowering the economically weak members of the society. Despite the availability of cooperative societies, it appears that a significant proportion of rural women are either unaware of the existence of such cooperative societies or are lacking in the basic socioeconomic characteristics that form the prerequisite for participation in such activities. The study, therefore, examined the linkage between women cooperatives and agricultural output. The study was conducted in some selected local government areas in the Enugu state of Nigeria in 2015 using the proportionate sampling technique to select 267 respondents. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the demographic characteristics of the respondents while the regression analysis, Analysis of Variance and the Sample t-test were used to test the hypothesis 5% level of significance. The result showed that women cooperatives have a positive but insignificant contribution to agricultural productivity in Enugu state. From the results is specifically shows that for a 1% increase in the number and magnitude of women cooperatives in Enugu state, agricultural productivity increases by 0.012. The result also shows that that there exists a significant difference between the agricultural output of female farmers in cooperatives and female farmers not in cooperatives. The ANOVA statistic yielded an F-statistic of 23.964 for the agricultural output of farmers in cooperatives and an F-statistic of 1.541 for the agricultural output of female farmers not in cooperatives. Finally, the significant problems that pose as threats to women cooperatives are low finance and low capacity building given that their t-statistics yielded 2.335 and 2.665 and probability values of 3.1% and 1.5% respectively. The study concludes that there is the need to encourage female farmers, by making available all that is necessary for successful farming and that increasing the number of women cooperative and membership has the prospect of increasing agricultural productivity in Enugu state. Based on the findings of this study, it is recommended that any policy that will further increase the level of education of women would increase their participation in cooperative society.