Abstract

Rural women face different obstacles in joining and being active participants in typically male dominated farmers’ cooperatives. The purpose of this study was to assess factors affecting rural women’s participation in multipurpose cooperatives in the Agarfa district. A multi-stage sampling technique was used to select 204 women members of the multipurpose farmer’s cooperatives from whom data were obtained through semi-structured interview, key informant interview and focus group discussion. Findings revealed that the women have low, medium and high participation in cooperatives with 23.5, 60.8 and 15.7% respectively. The result of the ordered regression showed that education level, land holding size, years of membership, attitudinal level, source of information use and access to training have a positive and significant effect on women’s participation in multipurpose farmer cooperatives, while household working hours, family size and cooperative distance have a negative and significant effect.  The study concluded that women have medium level participation which is attributed to a lack of economic and culture embedded gender equality.  The study recommended that there is a need to design and implement policies and legal enforcement that will plan training and intervention programs; income-generating farms; off-farm schemes; introduce and promote the use of appropriate technologies that will help to reduce women's domestic workload; support women’s participation in cooperatives leadership and management.

Key words:  Education level, family size, land holding size, multipurpose cooperatives, rural women