Effect Of Cooperatives On Economic Empowerment Of Women In Mbaitolu Local Government Area Of Imo State

ABSTRACT

The term cooperative as used by Beicher et al, (1992), covers a very broad range 1' of organization and activities and it is difficult, if not impossible to specify a single succinct set of necessary condition for an organization to be called cooperative. Erdman and Tinley,1987), argued that one frequently used criterion is to regard as a cooperative an organization that subscribes to some set of cooperative principles such as those of the international cooperative alliance. Cooperative society has been defined severally as a retail organization in which the consumers are members who provide the capital and share the trading profits in the form of a dividend on purchase made by each members, the producers join together to market their products, and share the trading profit. New Lexicon (1991), defined cooperative society as a voluntary attempt by people to solve their economic problems though the establishment of a democratically managed nonprofit business, where each participant has a fair share in the management and sharing results. A cooperative society is a group of persons who cooperate, work or act together for example, to buy machines and provide services for all to share or to produce, sell goods among themselves for mutual benefits or to save and lend money (Hornby, 2001).