FACTORS AFFECTING WOMEN'S CONTRIBUTION TO DECISION MAKINGTOWARDS COOPERATIVEDEVELOPMENTS IN YEWA DIVISION, OGUNSTATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The study examined factors affecting women contribution towards decision making
cooperative development in Yewa Division of Ogun-State Nigeria. Data was gathered
through a well-structured questionnaire administered to one hundred and twenty (120)
cooperative women using a two-stage random sampling technique. Both descriptive and
inferential statistics were used to analysed collected data. The results showed that
respondents were economically active range, with mean household size of six (6) individuals.
The results also revealed that majority (55.0%) of the respondents had been members
between 5 and 11 years or more and they were also literate meaning that they can read and
write. The findings also showed that cooperative women had family responsibilities and
obligations to be fulfilled within their family. Age, education, religion, marital status,
household size and gender exhibited significant at 1%, 5% and 10% significance level
respectively. Gender equality, adequate involvement in cooperative decision making process
by cooperative women, reorganisation of women gender roles in cooperative organization,
high self-confidence of women, provision of cooperative education to cooperative women and
provision of adequate and frequent cooperative information to women were identified as
important strategies and agreed as solution to some challenges encountered by the
respondents. The study recommended that, government should empower cooperatives
financially to ensure that cooperative societies have sufficient funds to provide loans to their
members, with low interest rates on loans to incentivize members to access credit facilities to
facilitate their interest of cooperative women to contribute to cooperative development.
Furthermore, cooperative should enlighten, educated and encouraged cooperative women in
order to contribute to cooperative development. Constraints facing cooperative women on
contribution to decision making towards cooperative development should be addressed
properly.