Analysis of Cooperative Societies Effectiveness in Credit Delivery to Agricultural Enterprises in Calabar Municipality of Cross River State, Nigeria

DOI: 10.15580/GJAS.2014.8.080914323 The study analyzed the effectiveness of cooperative societies in credit delivery to agricultural enterprises in Calabar Municipality of Cross River State. The specific objectives were to analyze the institutional characteristics of the cooperatives, analyzed number of loan applied and approved over a period of time, the effectiveness and constraints of cooperatives. The study used a multi-stage random sampling technique to select 30 agricultural cooperative societies in the Municipality. Primary data for the study were collected in 2013, using wellstructured questionnaire. The data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics and Queue model. The result revealed that the mean age of the cooperative societies was 5.7 years and 70% of them were more than 5 years in operation. The cooperative societies had an average approval rate of 94.5% with an average traffic intensity of 1.06 and an idle time of -0.14. This showed that cooperative societies were not very efficient in the Queue management. The major constraints militating against cooperative society’s effectiveness were low loan repayment and embezzlement of funds (poor management of funds). Any policy that will improve proper management of funds and higher loan repayment will improve the managerial ability of the cooperative management and increase the approval rate to 100 percent and the idle time to zero. Submitted: 09/08/2014 Accepted: 24/09/2014 Published: 26/09/2014