Ashenafi Gebremichael Biru

Agricultural Cooperatives, Food Security and Women Empowerment: Role of Agricultural Cooperatives in Promoting Food Security and Women Empowerment in Eastern Zone of Tigray Region, Ethiopia Ashenafi Gebremichael Biru

Cooperatives can help farmers to have access to inputs, credit, output markets, and opportunities to engage in more diversified, higher value crop production. They can reduce the transaction costs of accessing markets and improve the bargaining power of small scale farmers. This study was done in 2007/08 to assess the meaningful contribution of agricultural cooperatives in promoting food security and women empowerment. It has adopted purposive sampling for the selection of the target woreda and multi stage random sampling for the selection of multipurpose cooperatives and respondents. The data analysis employed various statistical tools The survey result indicated that cooperatives are serving the rural community and contributing a lot in improving the standards of living of their members. They undertake various economic activities which help the members in promoting food security and gender equality. However, due to poor implementation capacity and low managerial, financial and operational competence, Agricultural cooperatives have not been able to strengthen and expand their business operations as per the expectations.