Organizational Strategies for Addressing Barriers to Women’s Participation in Agricultural Cooperatives

Abstract

Most of the time, women's active participation is structural and stems from household and community sociocultural norms. Both the law and culture acknowledge males as the nominal owners of household assets in the vast majority of cases. Women consequently do not have equal access to money and benefits. Due to this lack of access, women's confidence is further undermined, which makes it rare for them to hold important positions in market-based agricultural and mixed cooperatives. The study adopted mixed method research design and targeted 45 registered dairy and coffee cooperative with a membership of 114,267 members in Kiambu County. Simple random sampling was used to sample 398 female members who participated in the study. Data was collected using questionnaires and key informant interview guides. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected. Quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics while qualitative data was analyzed using content analysis. The findings indicated that Level of education and age have a significant influence on women participation with both variables having a p value of 0.000. The findings also indicate that organizational policy strategies significantly affect women participation in agricultural cooperatives at p=0.000 and r=0.33. The study recommends that agricultural cooperatives should institute policies that favor women participation such as coopting some women members.