Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies (SCCs): A Panacea to Accessing Funds for Housing Development to Workers of Public Institutions in Nigeria

Abstract

This paper assesses the impact of Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies (SCCS) as a panacea to providing funds for housing development to workers in Nigeria public service. The Institute of Agricultural Research (IAR) Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria-Nigeria was used as a case study for the research. Questionnaires were administered to 82 staff of the institution that belongs to the institute cooperative society (IAR Rangwame Multipurpose Cooperative Society (IRMCS)) and a separate designed questionnaire was given to 3 officials of the society. Descriptive analysis, chi-square test and cooperators satisfaction index (CSI) was used for analyzing the data collected. The findings from the analysis showed that 7(8.5%) of IRMCS members have bare lands, 11(13.4%) have their houses under construction and 5(6.1%) have completed their houses while the remaining 59 members did not benefited IRMCS housing loan. The CSI on each attribute of “interest rate”, “affordability”, “transaction cost”, “availability” and “collateral” for cooperative loan are greater than 4 (close to 5) except for “availability” which is close to 4 and the aggregated CSI for all attributes is 4.17 which is also close to 5 is very high compared to National Housing Fund (NHF) CSI’s on each attributes which are all less than 2.7 with an aggregated CSI of 2.5. Also, the cooperators range of dissatisfaction index (RDI) was determined and it was found that cooperative loan had the lowest (0.832) against NHF of 2.41 and this indicates that IRMCS members are well satisfied with cooperative loans compared to the NHF. The paper concludes that SCCS can be a viable instrument in impacting positively towards funding housing projects to workers of public institutions.

Keywords: SCCS, Informal sources of finance, Housing, NHF, CSI, RDI