WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT THROUGH PARTICIPATION IN PUBLIC AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION SERVICES

Abstract

The study aimed at exploring the empowerment of women farmers through participation in public agricultural extension services, to determine some selected characteristics of women farmers and finding out the relationships between those characteristics and their empowerment. Data were collected by using a pre-tested interview schedule from the women farmers of Phulbari Upazila in Dinajpur district. Data were collected from randomly selected 104 respondents of the total 1040 rural women participate in public extension services by using simple random sampling method from 10 September to 17 October, 2017. The selected 13 characteristics of the women farmers such as age, education, husband’s age, husband’s education, family education, family size, farm size, family income, access to facilities, access to credit, family shock, spousal age gap and dependency ratio were considered as the selected characteristics where empowerment of rural women constituted the focus issue. Empowerment of women farmers was measured by 2-point rating scale using six dimensions of empowerment. It was found the observed score of empowerment of the women farmers ranged from 6 to 32 in score while the possible range was 0 to 36. The mean empowerment score was 22.92 with a standard deviation of 6.20. The highest mean empowerment score of the women farmers was observed for legal dimension (4.70) followed by socio-cultural dimension (4.06) and familial dimension (3.92). Among the women farmers, 46.2 percent belonged to medium status of empowerment while 45.2 percent of them had high status of empowerment and 8.7 percent had low status of empowerment. Five (5) out of 13 selected characteristics of women farmers are education, husband’s education, family education, access to facilities and dependency ratio had positive significant relationships with their empowerment. Four (4) characteristics are age, husband’s age, family shock and spousal age gap had negative significant relationship with their empowerment. Rests of the characteristics are family size, farm size, family income and access to credit had no significant relationship with their empowerment.