Women Farmers Empowerment: The Role of Cooperative Societies in Kwara State, Nigeria

Cooperatives have the potential to be an important instrument for women to carry out social transformation, especially in rural areas. The study, however, investigates the role of cooperative societies in women empowerment in Kwara State, Nigeria. A Multistage random sampling technique was used to select 219 respondents for the study. A Well-structured questionnaire was used to elicit information from the respondents and the data obtained were analysed through descriptive and inferential statistics. The results of the findings showed that respondents were in their productive age with a mean age of 42 years. The majority (90.0%) of the respondents were married with a household size of 8 dependants. Higher percentage (93.0%) of the respondents were educated with primary education (57.5%) as the highest educational level attained by the respondents. Respondents were majorly practising farmers with 14 years of farming experience and earning an average of ₦243,741.1 per annum. The cooperative societies empowered women farmers mostly by provision of advisory and advocacy services (92.2%), collective processing of farm produce (90.9%) and skill acquisition programmes (90.4%). Women farmers participated more in the collective processing of farm produce (M.S= 4.16). The level of participation of women in empowerment programmes was moderate (94.5%, M= 2.76) with a higher level of empowerment in psychological aspects (96.0%; M= 3.96) than economic (97.7%, M= 2.38) and socio-cultural (90.9%, M= 2.89) dimensions. Women farmers were constrained mainly with limited access to credit (M= 2.79) and limited funds (M= 2.53) to deliver empowerment programmes. There is a positive and significant relationship (p<0.05) between age, farming experience, household size, years of membership in cooperatives and the level of participation. The PPMC results also show a significant correlation (r = 0.67, p< 0.05) between levels of participation and empowerment. The study therefore recommended that the government should make adequate credit facilities and funds available to cooperative societies to roll out more empowerment programmes to women farmers for sustainable livelihoods and food security.