Abstract
The study aimed at determining the women empowerment status through participation in IGAs of SUS and to explore its relationships of their selected characteristics with empowerment status. Data were collected during October to December 2006 through pre- tested interview schedule, Focus Group Discussion (FGD), Scored Causal Diagrams (SCDs) and case study from randomly selected 212 respondents from three unions of Netrokona Sadar Upazila. The selected twelve characteristics of the women were considered as the independent variables while their empowerment status through participation in IGAS of SUS constituted the dependent variable. Majority (89 percent) of the women were moderately empowered while eight percent and three percent were highly and poorly empowered respectively. Among the six indicators of women empowerment, the status of participation in decision making was the highest followed by contribution to household economy, level of networking and friendship, access to resources, access to information and access to service providers. FGD yielded 24 IGAs operated by the women in the study area. Most (62 percent) of the women had medium, 21 percent had low and 17 percent had high functional participation in agricultural IGAS and all of them participated in non-agricultural IGAs to a low extent. In terms of functional participation, chicken rearing was the most important and it ranked first with SAFPS (Standard Activity Functional Participation Score) of 96 and the lowest important IGA was fish business with SAFPS 39. Among the . characteristics of the women, education, farm size, credit received, training received, duration of involvement in SUS, family income, daily time use, attitude towards SUS and functional participation in IGAS showed positive relationship with empowerment status but fatalistic attitude was negative while their age and family size were not correlated. Path analysis indicates that the variation on women empowerment was mainly due to the contributions of six predictors viz. training exposure, duration of involvement in SUS, daily time use, fatalistic attitude, attitude towards SUS and functional participation in IGAS. Empowerment status model indicates that 67 percent of the total variation on women empowerment status was explained by these predictors. It concludes that the women need high functional participation in IGAS with intensive training exposure, long duration of involvement in SUS, longer daily time use, less fatalistic attitude and more favorable attitude towards SUS. The six relevant characteristics having significant effects improvise their contribution to empowerment status and among those, functional participation in IGAS provided the highest contribution explaining 20.46 percent variation on the empowerment status, while the lowest contribution explaining 4.08 percent by fatalistic attitude. The major constraints encountered by the women to participate in IGAS were 'lack of vaccine for poultry', 'insufficient credit', 'lack of homestead farm land' and 'lack of training'. Making vaccine available for poultry in the rural areas by the Directorate of Livestock Services (DLS), providing need-based credit for the participants by SUS and utilizing the fallow lands for vegetable cultivation were the important suggestions made by the women to overcome the constraints.