Women Empowerment Through Cooperative A Case Study of Abhiyan Nepal, Arjundhara 3, Jhapa
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Faculty of Rural Development
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.