Stakeholders Perception of Cooperative Societies as a Micro- Credit Delivery Channel in the Nigerian Financial Sector Reform Era

Apologize The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution 64/136 on December 21, 2009 declaring year 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives. This is to showcase the contribution and impact of cooperative to the socio-economic well-being of the participants among other reasons (Oluyombo, 2012). The financial sector reform that led to the establishment of microfinance banks is expected to have effect on cooperative development in Nigeria. The study attempted to examine the perceptions of Cooperative leaders in the six states of South Western Nigeria in the era of financial sector reforms. The data collected though the questionnaires and interview were sorted edited and coded in a table. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) as well as t-test were used to test the hypothesis on the cross sectional perception of members and leaders of cooperative societies on its impact as a micro credit delivery channel in the six selected states of the south west Nigeria. The result of the Analysis of Variance on the differences in the impact of cooperative societies as a microfinance delivery channel across the six states of Nigeria revealed the Fcalculated value of 2.32 whose probability close to zero percent suggest that there is a difference in the impact of cooperative society as a microfinance delivery channel across the state in Nigeria. The multiple comparison of the differences showed that the mean difference is significant at 0.5% between Lagos, Ekiti and Ondo State., also with Ekiti and Lagos and Oyo State. The same thing with Ondo,Lagos and Oyo State. Oyo has significant difference in the impact compared to Ekiti, Ondo and Osun State so also was the impact in Osun State significantly different to that of Oyo State. The mean perception in Ogun State is not significantly different from other selected States see Table 4. From the table of mean of mean perception score of respondents SSEs on the impact of cooperative societies as a microfinance delivery channels across six states in the South Western Nigeria, over 76.5% had mean perception score of 50 or more, indicating the majority of the respondents with high mean perception score in the study area.