Towards Enhancing Household’s Food Security in Rural Abia State: Have Women Cooperative Societies got any Place?

Abstract

The place of cooperatives in the lives of rural households in Nigeria as in the case in many developing countries of the world cannot be overemphasized. This is because a sizeable number of households from this economy rely on agriculture and other small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) as their sources of livelihood. Worse still, the fact that the income they get from these activities is inadequate sometimes, make them look for other avenues of meeting their basic needs, hence they resolve to join or form cooperatives. Again, lack of collateral and imposition of other stringent measures by formal financial institutions make credit facilities inaccessible to these households, thus limiting scale of their activities and this invariably take a toll on their income. Meanwhile, participation in cooperatives has been found to be a veritable way of circumventing some of the problems predisposing rural households to food insecurity. The study area was Abia State, Nigeria. Multistage sample technique was used in selection of sample size. Abia State is made up of three agricultural zones, namely Umuahia, Aba, and Ohafia respectively. From this zones, Umuahia agricultural zone was purposively selected with one local government area (Isialangwa) was selected. From the local government area two blocks, three circles and thirty women belonging to registered women cooperatives were selected, thus bringing the total to 180 respondents. Data were collected using structured questionnaire and participatory observation. Data were analyzed using simple descriptive and inferential statistics, like probit regression model. Results revealed that mean age of the respondents was 53 years with a large household size 10 – 12 people. Respondents distribution by educational level show that majority of the respondents (67%) were educated up to tertiary level and with 23% of them no formal education. The Table further showed that 73% of the respondents were food insecure while 23% were food secure. On activities carried out by the women cooperative societies to enhance livelihood of its members, the result shows that all the responses made by the respondents were above 3.0. The implication is that the activities had a positive relationship in enhancing the well-being of the members. The probit analysis result reveal that age, education, household size, membership of cooperative, income were significantly related to Y. therefore based on the study of the findings cooperatives play a very prominent and significant role towards ensuring food security in rural Nigeria. And so cooperative societies need to properly guided and organized especially at their formative stages having seen it as a veritable channel of meeting the needs of rural women in Nigeria.