Abstract:
Rural women belong to the most deprived section of the society facing adverse conditions in
terms of social oppression and economic inequality, a visible majority of them being poor. So
Women empowerment, as a policy approach, uses different mechanisms to empower women;
out of which organizing women into cooperatives is attracting the attention of many
organizations. Thus a study was conducted to assessing the role of cooperatives in promoting
socioeconomic empowerment of women in rural areas of Jimma Zone, SekkaWoreda credit
and saving cooperative. The study design of this study wasl an integration of descriptive and
explanatory research design. On the other way based on data collected from 6 cooperative
224 purposively selected respondents in the study areas. In addition, key informant interviews
and secondary data were also used to collect the necessary information. And finally, the
collected data was analyzed using statistical package for social science version.21 (SPSS)
software descriptive statistics (mean standard deviation, inferential and binary logistics
regression was used to check the magnitude of effects. The binary logistic regression analysis
the role of co-operatives on socio-economic dimension empowerment depict that the
demographic factors, institutional factors and economic factors have a significant positive
effect on Women’s socio-economic empowerment with (p-value=0.05). The result identified
that the contribution of cooperatives on woman’s income improvement, enhanced capacity
building, promote participatory and democracy, create safe working condition and
bargaining power and align access to decision makings.To sum-up in majority of the metrics
used the respondents have shown improvement in their socioeconomic status, however, there
are still limitations that hinder women from active participation in their cooperatives. Thus,
considerable awareness creation and women empowerment advocacy activities and policies
should be derived by appropriatestakeholders.
