Women Empowerment Through Cooperative A Case Study of Abhiyan Nepal, Arjundhara 3, Jhapa

Abstract

Nepalese women are suffering from social, cultural and economic biases in the traditional male dominated society of Nepal. Moreover, rural women are facing these problems. In this condition, women empowerment programs are needed for empowering those people in every field. Empowerment is a process, which enables women to generate and build up their individual and social capability. Empowerment allows individuals to reach their full potential to improve their potentialities. Cooperative is the one important program for empowering the women in every field or area. Specially, in developing countries, cooperatives enable very poor, back ward and disadvantaged people to engage in self dependent and financial-decision making sectors. Now a day, government, NGOs and INGOs are launching several cooperative programs for women empowerment. The present study is focused on assessing the impact of cooperative run by Abhiyan Nepal, Arjundhara in empowering women of Arjundhara Municipality ward no.3. The general objectives of the study are to discover the women position and role in Nepalese society. The specific objectives are to find out the role of cooperative in socio-economic upliftment of women, to identify the empowering areas and to examine the pre-post conditions after implementing the programs. The data are collected from both secondary and primary sources. The study has carried out both the explanatory as well as descriptive research design, and mixed method i.e. qualitative and quantitative has been used. In field survey, out of 31total members, 16 women respondent were selected by random sampling process for study. The study concludes the women empowerment through cooperative model has played been effective in providing earning and decision making or leadership development for the members. There could be many aspects to explain the empowerment of women in addition to other issues and sectors which this study has not addressed. This research only addresses economic empowerment and leading capacity or decision making capacity of women at individual level. Moreover, the research could not deal with the factors like, age, education, caste, marital status of respondents which may greatly influence their decision making capacity. In conclusion, cooperative programs can help the women for playing the independent role in every individual and social sector.