A STUDY ON THE IMPACT OF DAIRY COOPERTAIVE UNION ON WOMEN FARMERS; THE CASE OF BEFTU BERGA DAIRY UNION, WESTERN OROMIA, ETHIOPIA

Abstract

The role of cooperative boldly underlined and recognized as one of paths to development with other sectors in rural and agricultural policy of Ethiopia. The culture of cooperation is not new phenomena to Ethiopians, but the ways of its development is not successful as a result of many bottlenecks. Since a new proclamation of cooperative 147/98 enacted a number of cooperatives were established and operational all over the nation. Among these cooperatives the secondary level cooperatives the so called unions are the emerging institutions in modern Ethiopia cooperative movement. The dairy unions are one of the institutions that backup smallholder farmers that comprises more than 90 per cent of livestock output producers of the country. This study was targeting this sector and focusing on Bifetu Berga dairy cooperative union that all members farmers are smallholder dairy producers. The objectives of this study was to assess the participation of women members in the cooperative society, to evaluate the income and employment generated by the union to member farmers. The study evaluated the service rendered by the union to its members. On top of this, it offers suggestions based on the findings. For this research project purposive sampling was used and 75 respondents that are all of them are women members from three member primary dairy cooperative societies were selected and interviewed. Focus group discussions for cooperative leaders and women group was used to have first hand information. The research methodology followed during this time was, primary data collection methods that includes; focus group discussions, household surveys and researcher own observation. In addition to this, secondary data were collected using document survey like reports, studies, publications, websites and other relevant sources. To analyzes the collected information through various sources; descriptive statistics; mean, medium, mode, percentage and frequencies were employed. In relation to this, after coding the collected data, SPSS was used to have reliable and consistent information that enriches the findings . Based on the research findings, it is revealed that the performance and service delivery of the union to members were unsatisfactory. The major reason for this were: the overall capacity of the union were poor to address the members needs on the areas of improved feed, AI, improver heifer and etc service deliveries. The major shortcomings are capital, professional employees, credit and related problems. The other important result of this study is; the participation of women on decision making in cooperative matters were very poor, and the leaders of all societies under investigation was men biased. The percentage of women board members in the union and at each primary cooperative society was below 20% and 33 % respectively. Unfortunately, there were no women xv board directors for two cooperative societies. Only one primary dairy cooperative i.e Telila Berga; all members were women, no men members, as a result all boards of directors were women. As far as the income of women members are concerned , most of respondents revealed that their income from the dairy product positively increases just after become member of their cooperative societies. The study also revealed that although most 80 percent of livestock related activities are performed by women farmers almost the larger members of cooperative societies in the study areas were men dominant (71 %). This shows that most women dairy farmers were not benefited from the income as well as employment generated by dairy cooperative societies at two levels were insignificant. This research study made some recommendations based upon the empirical analysis done deploying the study at the union and primary cooperative society level. These recommendations are: the needs of leading the union with professionals on the managerial and technical positions, the input provision of the union should be strengthened, brining more women board of directors to leadership positions at both primary and union level through redesigning the cooperative bylaws in order to favors women members, intensive promotion and awareness building endeavors will be pertinent to have more number of women cooperative members, the accessibility of members to credit, market, feed, AI service needs special attention in order to serve more members. Thus, the union and its affiliates improve their service delivery mechanism to forge competitiveness of the dairy value chain.