Access to credit facilities among arable crop farmers in Ido Local Government Area, Oyo State

Abstract

Many farmers have hardly been able to meet the farm expenditure due to lack of financial command and potential. Therefore, access to credit facilities among arable crop farmers in Ido Local Government Area of Oyo State was investigated. Multi- stage sampling procedure was used to select 104 respondents for the study. Data were collected through the use of questionnaire on socio-economic characteristics, means of credit awareness, access to credit facilities, utilization of credit and constraint facing in getting access to credit facilities. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics of frequency count, percentage, mean and charts and multiple linear regression for the objectives while Spearman correlation were used to analyzed the hypothesis. The results revealed that most of the respondents 81.7% was male, 54.8% were between the ages of 41-50 years, majority of the farmers were married and 33.7% had adult education. The results also revealed that the major means of credit facilities on awareness obtained from the study area was from friends, 92.3% heard about the credit awareness, 81.7% had their source of credit facilities by personal saving and majority of the farmers utilized their credit through planting materials. Spearman correlation coefficient showed that there were significant differences at p<0.05 by the respondents in the study area. Some problems hindering the access to credit facilities in the study area were amount required, period of payment, lack of collateral etc. The study recommends that government should set up financial institutions to provide fund to interested farmers at subsidized rate and easy period of payment.

Keywords: Access, Credit Facilities, Credit awareness, Utilization of Credit, Arable Crop Farmers