Contribution of Co-operative Organizations to Poverty Alleviation in Yewa North Local Government Area of Ogun State, Nigeria

The study examined the contribution of co-operative organizations to poverty alleviation. A multistage random sampling technique was used to select 100 members of co-operative societies in Yewa North Local Government Area of Ogun State. A questionnaire was used to collect data from the respondents. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the personal characteristics of the respondents. The Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) Poverty Measure Model was used to assess poverty level and its variation across socio-economic characteristics. The result of the study revealed that more than half of the respondents were males, married, had secondary education and engaged in small and medium scale business. Poverty incidence among female respondents was 0.58 while that of the male respondents was 0.67. Poverty incidence was also high among respondents with no formal education with poverty incidence of 0.8000 which tends to 1.00. The result also revealed that the respondents who engaged in trading had higher poverty incidence of 0.7059 when compared with farming household (0.4379). The poverty incidence of Co-operative members was 0.5500 while that of the non-Co-operative members was 0.5714. This revealed that cooperatives had significantly contributed to poverty reduction among the respondents. It was recommended that co-operative members should encourage others to join co-operative societies so that they could have access to adequate financial and technical assistance and provision of basic farm inputs to alleviate their level of poverty.