Willingness to Participate in Platform Cooperatives among Members of Abundant Farmers’ Cooperative Society, Ikorodu, Lagos State, Nigeria

Abstract

One of the efforts to improving the livelihood of citizens within the rising e-economy space is cooperatives promotion among actors in  the agricultural value chain. Despite this, inequality and poverty have been on the rise while e-business is increasing in all sectors. This  has led to the rethinking of conventional cooperatives to shift to platform cooperatives (PCoop) for market expansion and surplus  sharing. Nevertheless, the literature on PCoop is lean, worldwide. This study therefore investigated the awareness and willingness to  participate in PCoop, among members of a Farmers’ Cooperatives in Ikorodu, Lagos. Multistage sampling procedure was used to 90 cooperative members. Data on socio-economic characteristics, awareness and willingness to participate in PCoop were collected with  Questionnaires. The data was described using frequency distribution, percentage and analysed with probit regression. The results  showed that majority were male (60.7%), below 50 years old (58.34%), had first degree (54.7%), maximum of one million naira yearly farm  income (48.8%), aware of PCoop (86.90%) and willing to participate in PCoop (88.10%). Further, the female respondents (0.354) have lower  and those that were aware of PCoop (0.307) have higher probabilities of willingness to participate in PCoop than their opposite  categories. Years of formal education (0.006) and age (-0.031) have positive and negative relationship with the probability of willingness  to participate in PCoop respectively. These coefficients were significant at levels higher than 10%. Awareness campaign on PCoop should  commence for agricultural cooperatives members to shift to PCoop to boost members’ income and e-business.