Evaluation of Fund for Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme in Nigeria: A Tool for Economic Growth and Development

Abstract

Financing agricultural projects had suffered greatly because it was below the desired minimum to support economic growth. Hence, the establishment of Agricultural credit guarantee scheme fund to strengthen the contribution of the sector in economic development. This paper focuses on the effort to make empirical verification on variables like loan guarantee (AC), number of farmers benefited (NF)), Agricultural Produce (AO) and Non-oil export (OE) and their impact on GDP. The results show that variables, such as guaranteed loan, number of benefiting farmers, agricultural produce indicate positive sign and are significant in growth of GDP at 5% level of significance: The findings reveal that it is imperative to increase the number of farmers' beneficiary to agricultural loan scheme and agricultural produce if visible impact can be made on GDP from the sector. This is because the real sector economy has been neglected in Nigeria at the expense of the oil sector for several decades. Thus, this sector of the economy suffers consistently from overwhelming trade deficit from the international communities.