Proceedings of 8th Annual London Business Research Conference
Imperial College, London, UK, 8 - 9 July 2013, ISBN: 978-1-922069-28-3
Cooperative Society and Poverty Alleviation in Developing
Countries
Nwandu Erinma Chibuzo
Poverty is a state of deprivation and want. It is the inability to take care of
basic needs such as clothing, food and shelter. Streeten and Burki (1978)
also define poverty as lack of access to production resources, education,
working skills and tools. Generally, scholars on the subject agree that
cooperative society is basically for economic improvement of its members
through social means of group participation and joint effort. Olaleye (2004).
Poverty in developing countries has been a long standing problem; successive
governments have tried to address with little or no success. This paper looks
critically at how governments have tried to alleviate poverty among its citizens
through cooperative societies and other poverty reduction programmes. It will
also examine the effectiveness of the cooperative societies (formal and
informal) in alleviating poverty in developing countries. The study is based on
theoretical and empirical framework. The researcher focuses on South East of
Nigeria from 1992-2012. Multistage random sampling technique was used to
administer the well structured questionnaires while questions were developed
from the objectives and research questions. The result was analyzed using
the descriptive statistical method in line with the mean-data analysis method.
The researcher found out that over 90% of the citizens of developing countries
earn less than $200/ month, so cooperative societies are used to bridge the
gap in their disposable income. It was also revealed that Government efforts
at alleviating poverty are marred with inefficiency, incompetence and outright
fraud. The researcher recommended among other things that government
should ensure that funds are accessible and cheap to cooperative societies.
Keywords: Poverty Alleviation, Reduction, Inefficiency, Incompetence, Fraud,
Cooperative
.
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Nwandu Erinma Chibuzo, Department of Business Administration and Management, Institute of
Management and Technology. Enugu. Nigeria. Email: mastertravels@yahoo.com and
nmaleechibuzo.n2013@yahoo.com