Assessment of Rural Farmers’ Access to Credit in Jigawa State, Nigeria

Attaining self-sufficiency in terms of food production has been a major policy goal of the Nigerian government and credit is one of the necessary ingredients required to ensure that this comes to fruition. The study assessed farmers’ access to credit in Jigawa State. A multistage sampling procedure was used to sample 360 respondents from the four agricultural zones in the state. A structured interview schedule was used to collect data on respondents’ socioeconomic characteristics, sources of credit available, access to credit and constraints to credit; these were analysed using descriptive (frequencies, percentages, means, and ranks) and inferential (Binomial Logit and ANOVA) statistics. The mean age was 46.18years and 61.3% had Quranic education. Majority were males (89.44%), married (96.4%) with a mean household size of 16 members. Mean years of farming experience was 22.51 years and majority (77.8%) do not belong to any cooperative association. Majority (84.72%) did not recognised the presence of any source of credit and majority had no access to credit (84.72%). Lack of credit providing institution ( = 2.70), lack of awareness of credit acquisition source ( = 2.68), lack of collateral ( = 2.51), high interest rate ( = 2.44) and late approval ( = 2.01) were the major constraints impeding respondents’ access to credit. Age, marital status, membership of cooperative society, household size and years of farming experience were significantly related to access to credit. However, there was no significant difference (F= 1.622) in respondents’ access to credit across agricultural zones in the state. Efforts should be geared towards ensuring the establishment of credit institutions in the study area both by the government and private bodies. The Policy framework for farmers’ access to credit should be revisited and necessary adjustment that will favour farmers’ access to credit should be considered. Efforts should also be directed at encouraging farmers to constitute themselves into formal cooperative groups to make for easy access to credit, and Information on credit access and the modalities for accessing credit should be made available to farmers where possible and timely.