Assessing Empowerment of Farm Women: The Case of Barisal Sadar Upazila

The study was conducted to determine the extent of empowerment of the trained farm women and also to explore the influential factors of their empowerment status. The study was conducted at 5 villages of Kashipur union in Barisal Sadar upazila in Bangladesh. Data was collected from randomly selected 114 women from these villages using a pre-tested interview schedule during 2 February to 10 March 2016. The overall empowerment status scores of the farm women ranged from 28 to 83 against a possible range of 0 to 126. The sampled women had a low-medium level of empowerment (M = 48.23). Among the five dimensions of empowerment, psychological and economic empowerment dominated over the other dimensions. Coefficient of correlation showed that out of 10 selected characteristics of the farm women, education, family education, annual family income, savings, training experience and communication exposure had positive significant relationships with their empowerment status.