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Women Empowerment and Associated Factors in Commercial Vegetable Farming Households of Bagamati Province, Nepal
Abstract
Women’s empowerment is considered pivotal in reducing gender gaps for sustainable agricultural growth. Despite the significant role of women in commercial vegetable farming, their empowerment status and gaps compared with men, owing to disparities in resource access, decision-making, and income control, have been poorly understood. This study assessed the status of women’s empowerment among commercial vegetable producing households and identified the key factors associated with women’s empowerment. The primary data were collected from Kavrepalanchowk, Dhading and Chitwan districts. The study included 120 randomly selected dual-adult households with husband and wife jointly involved in commercial vegetable production. Each spouse was interviewed separately, yielding 240 individual respondents in the analytical sample. The level of women’s empowerment in vegetable farming households was analysed using the abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (a-WEAI), while the associated factors of a-WEAI for female farmers (a-WEAIfemale) were further explored using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression. The study revealed that the a-WEAIfemale in the vegetable farming households is 0.704, with only about 40% of women being empowered in the five domains. About 82.5% of the women were lacking gender parity with men, and the average empowerment gap was 34.8%. The gender parity index obtained was 0.713, which indicated women are less empowered than men. The a-WEAI score demonstrated that the women in the commercial vegetable farming households are achieving 70.4% of the total potential empowerment. The OLS regression results showed that significant factors associated with women's empowerment were dependency ratio (p<0.001), outmigration (p<0.005), off-farm income (p<0.005), and membership (p<0.005). Therefore, policy initiatives to enhance women’s empowerment should focus on minimizing household dependency burdens, ensuring targeted support to migrant households, providing income diversification opportunities and strengthening women’s participation in farm-based organizations.
Keywords
References
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DOI: 10.33687/ijae.014.01.6225
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