Changing patterns of risk management by self-help organizations of savings and credit: the Nigerian experience

This article examines the Nigerian experiments of attempting to modernize indigenous savings and credit associations and of linking them to commercial banks. In a first part historical forms of self-help organizations are presented in a comparative perspective as they emerged in Germany. In a second part the various experiments in Nigeria during the last sixty years are presented. The article comes to the concluding observation that until today in Nigeria only the traditional esusu-type self-help organizations offered at least some opportunities for risk management, while cooperatives and banks largely failed in that respect.