Abstract

The study was carried out to examine the credit availability, utilization and repayment among women arable crop farmers in Egba Division, Ogun State, Nigeria. The total number of sampled respondents selected randomly for these findings was one hundred and twenty eight (128) through the use of a well-structured questionnaire. The statistical tools used for this study are descriptive and inferential statistics. The study revealed that age of the women arable crop farmers within the range of 41 to 50 years has the percentage of 41.4% at this age with an average of 42.58, majority (85.9%) of the women arable farmers are married in which 50.8% have 4-6 household size in the study area. Majority (60.1%) of the farmers are literate while 39.8 percent of the women arable crop farmers are non literate. In addition, majority of the women farmers with the percentage of 57.0 have a farm size ranging within 1.0-3.0 hectares with 30.5% of them have farming experience ranging from 1-5 years, the results also revealed that majority (33.6%) women farmers earned N300,001 – N 500,000 from their farming activities. Specifically, the regression analyses indicate that age of the respondents, farming income, faming experience had positive while household size was negative with significant relationship to socio-economic factors that affect loan repayment. Furthermore, the study revealed that majority of women arable crop farmers in the study have financial problem (75%), high interest rate (68.8%) and Educational level (64.1%), respectively which serve as the major problems confronting them in obtaining credit. Therefore, the study recommends agricultural credit should be made available by the financial institutions to meet the various needs of the women farmers.