There are more men than women members in the Deposit-Taking Savings and Credit Co-operative Societies sub-sector, a new report has shown.
According to the SACCO subsector Demographics Study Report 2019, out of the 4.78 million members in the DT SACCO industry, 60.65per cent of them were male and 34.23per cent were female, with the gender of just about 5.12 per cent of them having not been disclosed by the respective DT-SACCOs.
These findings are not
consistent with the national population demographics in which the female gender
has been reported to slightly more than the male gender.
In the 2019 National
Census, the total enumerated population was 47,564,296 of which 23,548,056 were
males and 24,014,716 were females.
The report attributes
dominance of male gender in DT SACCOs to their control of key socio-economic
activities, from which SACCOs traditionally draw their membership such as
agricultural production (dairy, tea, coffee production etc); or formal
employment opportunities.
The youth, that is,
the population of members constitutionally defined to be within the
age-brackets of 18 years to 35 years accounted for 30.86per cent of the total
DT SACCO membership, which is nearly a third of all members.
These findings, thus, demystifies
the public parlance rhetoric that SACCO membership has no place for the youth.
The report unpacks the
age distribution and gender composition of the members of deposit-taking SACCOs
in Kenya.
SACCOs traditionally
draw their members from those engaged in farming, teachers, civil servants, community-organisations
and privately-owned firms.
Out of the population
of 4.78 million DT SACCO members, the largest proportion belong to
Farmers’-based DT-SACCOs which accounted for 47.81 per cent of all DT SACCO members.
Although Teachers-based
and Government-based DT-SACCOs controlled over 72per cent of total assets and
deposits, they only control 33 per cent of the entire DT SACCO membership.
