Leveraging on Rural Cooperatives in Informal Sector Financing for Economic Growth

This paper focuses on the finance function as it relates to economic growth and development in rural economies against the backdrop of the imperatives of inclusive growth and the underlying expected roles of small and medium enterprises that are generally seen as engines of growth. An attempt has herein been made to see why the experience in Nigeria of direct intervention through microcredit schemes have failed and which calls for a rethink and the proposition of the need to leverage on rural cooperatives for informal sector financing. This has herein been reinforced by putting forward a reasonable scholastic view of the advantages of rural informal cooperatives over the formal ones with the conclusion that over time if the rural informal cooperatives are supported to stabilize, they will on their own transform into formidable formal institutions without any coercion. Keywords: Rural informal cooperatives, Inclusive growth, Small and Medium Enterprises