Digital Literacy among Cooperative Trustees in Southwest Nigeria: A DigComp 3.0 Assessment and Smart-Cooperative Readiness Analysis

Abstract

Nigeria’s move towards digital economy and the quest for cooperative digitalisation in the country have made the digital literacy of cooperative trustees critical. In Nigeria, over four million cooperatives depend on elected trustees  whose digital competencies are critical to their participation in the evolving digital economy. A review of extant cooperative literature, revealed a dearth of empirical information on the subject matter. Against this backdrop, this study utilised the DigComp 3.0 framework to assess the digital literacy of trustees in Southwest Nigeria. Specifically, the study assessed the level of digital literacy of the trustees across the five DigComp 3.0 competence domains. It  employed a descriptive cross-sectional survey research design and multistage random sampling technique. Data were collected from 400 respondents  through a structured questionnaire adapted from the DigComp 3.0 items.  Of the 400 questionnaires distributed, 337 valid responses (84.3%) were analysed. The data was analysed using descriptive statistics, one-sample t-tests, Pearson correlation, and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. Findings revealed that the overall digital literacy index (DLI:  Mean=2.6454, SD=0.9868) was significantly below the midpoint [t(336)=−6.593, p<.001, 95% CI (−0.460, −0.251), Cohen's d=−0.36] indicating low digital literacy level. Nevertheless, the trustees  exhibited the highest digital literacy competencies (above the 3.0 threshold)  in  Information and Data Literacy  (IDL) domain  (IDL; M=3.1088) but the least competencies in the Digital Content Creation domain (DCC; M=2.2404; d=−0.73).  DLI correlated positively with smart-cooperative readiness (r=0.47, p<.01). OLS regression results confirmed DLI is significantly associated with readiness (β=.47, R²=.22, F(1,335)=94.7, p<.001). The study concludes that trustees in southwest Nigeria, on a balance, are not digitally literate enough for smart cooperative adoption and recommends  DigComp-aligned governance training to improve their digital literacy level.