The Role of Agricultural Cooperatives in Promoting Food Security and Rural Women’s Empowerment in Eastern Tigray Region, Ethiopia

Abstract

Freedom of association and the right to form organizations that are genuinely accountable and advance poor people's interests may contribute to sustainable poverty reduction and food security. Cooperatives can help in assuring farmers to have access to inputs, credit, output markets, and opportunities to engage in more diversified, higher value crop production. These organizations can reduce the transaction costs of accessing markets and improve the bargaining power of small farmers’ vis-à-vis large buyers and sellers.This study was conducted to assess the meaningful contribution of agricultural cooperatives in promoting food security and women’s empowerment in Eastern zone of Tigray Regional State, Ethiopia. The study has adopted purposive sampling for the selection of the target woreda and multi stage random sampling for the selection of multipurpose cooperatives and respondents and the data analysis employed various statistical tools like percentage, mean, standard deviation and regression analysis.The study result indicated that while cooperatives are serving the rural community, they are contributing a lot in improving the standards of living of their members residing in rural areas. They undertake various economic activities which help the members in promoting food security and gender equality. However, because of poor implementation capacity and low managerial, financial and operational competence, multipurpose cooperatives have not been able to strengthen and expand their business operations as per the expectations. The study recommended that concerted efforts are needed to organize seminars and campaigns to create awareness about cooperatives.

Keywords: Agricultural cooperatives, food security, women empowerment, income, awareness