Tro se aaya Analysis of Informal Credit Operations among Farmers in Atisbo Local Government Area of Oyo State, Nigeria

摘要

The study explored the operations,(savings and loan procurement), as well as the problems and prospects of the informal financial institutions in ATISBO Local Government Area of Oyo State, Southwest, Nigeria. Sampling techniques used was stratified random sampling to select three villages from the area and systematic random sampling of respondents was conducted to select 120 Respondents. With a mean age of 41.4 years most of the respondents' age fell betxveen 40 and 60 years. Some of the Respondents(16.7%) had no formal education though they were managing fairly large household sizes, with a mean of 10 members/household). 72.5% have no formal education, though their vast experience of the respondents in farming, (mean 21.5 years) has been a facilitating factor in productivity improvement in the locality. Savings mobilized per year ranged from H 96,000 to H 115,000.00 with a mean saving of N 72,840. The results shozoed that the Age, years of residency in the Locality, educational of the farmers, Farm size and Gender, all have significant relationships at 5% with the volume of loan procured by the Respondents. R~2 value and adjusted R~2 were 67% and 64%, F values was calculated as 13.2 respectively. The Linear function was selected as the equationof best fit. From the estimated linear lead equation, F-value was significant at 1% level of confidence implying that the variables all have collective impact on the volume of savings mobilized from the informal sources by the Respondents, hence the goodness of fit of the selected function. Some of the problems discovered on the operation of the informal services were short term expectation on loans repayment, inhibiting attitudes of group members, unsynchronized contributions to savings due to non-aligned cashflow in farming, elusive attitudes of money collectors and group Coordinators and simultaneous requests by members for funds (loans), due to specific timing in farm operations and domestic requirements. The prospects of the informal financial services and groups in Nigeria could be improved if relevant policies are formulated and geared towards support for agricultural sectors, increase in the net farm income of farmers in such a way that the marginal propensity to save and invest more on farming could increase. The need to implement policies to ensure sustainable integration of the indigenous savings institutions into the operations of the Community Banks through the mobile rural Banking strategies was suggested. Intensive use of extension services to facilitate adult literacy and learning among rural dwellers; especially farmers, to reduce illiteracy and empower farmers for savings, investment on agriculture as well as improved livelihood were also suggested.