Impact of Cooperative on Women Empowerment A case study of Sanopalati cooperative, Karthali VDC, Sindhupalchowk

Abstract

Co-operative is an economic enterprise and as self organization which functions on its own way and make supportive role in the rural development and economic development of Nepal. As Nepal is one of the least developed countries in the world, it is extremely necessary to uplift the status of the country. Co-operative movement is one of the measures to improve the economic condition. Moreover, the cooperative organizations of Nepal are working in rural areas to uplift the economic condition of poor people by accepting their small saving and providing loan at reasonable rate of interest for investing in productive and skill oriented sector. Present study focused the impact made by the Sano palati co-operative especially on the rural women. The specific objectives of the study were to study the socio-economic impact of cooperative activities to empower women, examine the change in socio-economic conditions of the rural women. The research was carried out on the basis of exploratory and descriptive research design. Source of data collected was the primary and secondary data while the nature of the data collected was quantitative and qualitative data. Among the total population about 12% of the samples were selected by using the simple random sampling method. The findings of the study showed that Sano palati cooperative focuses on enterprise support activities, social development activities such as literacy classes and health care training for the women members. The major concern of members of this cooperative includes education for themselves and for children, having own income and savings, improve security, improve access to institutions with resources, freedom to make own choices and decisions. To strengthen the cooperative both financially and socially, cooperative should provide training for commercial agriculture farming system to the member as well as can conduct mutual exchange of experience and training program. It should also make loan flow and loan recovery system more effective by regular supervision, monitoring and evaluation.