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.
