The Impact of Agricultural Cooperative Enterprises on household Income in Rural Communities of Kabwe District, Zambia

Mukwalikuli Mundia, Habeenzu Simamba, Moffat Kumwenda

Agricultural Cooperatives, Cooperative Members, Households, Rural Communities.

The study explored agricultural cooperatives enterprises on cooperatives’ household income in Kabwe district. The study used 385 closed ended questionnaires, whilst descriptive statistics, Pearson Chi-square test of independence, Pearson correlation analysis, logistic regression and Propensity Score Matching models were used to analyze quantitative data. The findings of the study indicates that 78.5% of the cooperative members had access to credit, while only 13.99% of the cooperative non-members did have access to credit during the 2020/2021 farming season.  The study indicates that being a cooperative member, farmers earned commodity income of K1484 higher than farmers who were not cooperative members and was statistically significant at 0.0001 p-value. Figure 4.2 also depict results on the effect of cooperative years on income, using a bar chart to present results. The bar chart shows the level of income for 2 years, 3-4 years, 5-6 years, 7-8 years, 9-10 years, 11-12 years, and 13-15 years. The results indicate that there is an increase in income as a farmer spend more years as a cooperative member.

This study concludes that enterprising cooperatives improves income at household level and further suggest that inadequate allocation of financial resources is a major impediment to the development of cooperative structures at district level. The implication of this is that cooperatives receive less technical support and hence fail to achieve the goal of livelihood improvement of members. To circumvent the challenges that confront operations of cooperatives, it is inevitable that policy action should work towards enhancing support to the cooperative movement in order to spur livelihood improvement in rural communities of developing countries

https://doi.org/10.31871/WJRR.20.5.31