ASSESSMENT OF WOMEN FARMERS’ PARTICIPATION IN AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION SERVICES IN DAMOT SORE WOREDA, WOLIATA ZONE, SOUTHEERN ETHIOPIA

Abstract

Women play a very important role in agricultural production in Ethiopia by contributing up to 60 to 80 percent labor to agricultural production. However, rural women farmers in Ethiopia including study area rarely participate in extension services and have little contact with extension service providers. Thus, the objective of this research was to assess women farmers’ participation in agricultural extension services in Damot sore woreda. A mixed methods approach was used. Multi-stage sampling technique was employed for the realization of the research objective. Sample respondents were selected by simple random sampling technique on probability proportional to size and primary data were collected from 241 rural women farmers. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected from primary and secondary sources. Focus group discussion, key informants interview and personal observations were the major data collection methods. The data were entered in STATA software and organized in tables and figures and further described and analyzed following descriptive statistics and Tobit regression analysis procedure. Marginal effect is used to interpret the effect of explanatory variables on the dependent variables. Out of fourteen hypothesized explanatory variables, seven were found to be significantly influencing the level of women farmers’ participation in agricultural extension services. These variables include household size, landholding size, farming system, attending extension training, use of credit, distance from FTC center and livestock holding size. Among these, except distance from FTC center which is negatively related to the degree of participation in extension services, all other variables are positively influencing household’s participation in agricultural extension services. The level of women’s participation in agricultural extension services were measured by calculating the score values of the participation index based on the mean score values were categorized in to low (30.29%), medium (51.4%) and high (18.26%) index of participation group. The level of women farmers’ participation in agricultural extension service in the study area was challenged by delay or untimely provision of extension services, gender blinded extension service delivery, insufficient resources for FTC, less frequency of extension agents contact with rural women, poor women and youth mainstreaming in the extension programs planning, implementation and evaluation, socio-cultural challenges, inadequate literacy rate, time burden, non-recognition of women as genuine participant client and limited involvement of different stakeholders in the provision of extension services. Finally, it was recommended that the government has to make the extension service delivery approach more demand driven and pluralistic in part. To promote participation, labor saving and women friendly technologies should be disseminated and government better to design legal frameworks through which stakeholders could involve in providing agricultural extensions services.