بررسي اثربخشي طرح تسهيلگران زن روستايي در شهرستان دماوند

An Investigation ofthe Effectiveness of Rural Women Facilitators Program in Damavand County

With the emergence of sustainable development paradigm in 1980s in human resource development processes, special attention was devoted to women so that they became to form the core of development definitions. Today in different countries such as in Iran, various programs for empoweringhave been implemented womenʹs status in rural, as well as in urban areas. In this process a devotion of special attention to empowering rural women in Iran is an essential task. Today 23 million from among Iranian population live in rural areas ofwhom 12 million are women, involved in different socio-economic activities, such as agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing, handicrafts, home management, etc (Mafi and Mosavi, 2004). According to the latest statistics, share of women in agricultural work force in Iran is40 percent (Iranʹs KarPress, 2006). Beginning with from 1999, Bureau for rural and tribal women, Ministry of Agricultural Jihad, allempted to implement rural women facilitators program with the aim of empowering rural women, the country. This program actually started in year 2001 in Damavand county and the present study is an attempt to investigate the effectiveness of the program in as implemented Damavand county. The study was carried out through survey research in6 villages from among 15 selected ones from 3 village blocks where the program was implemented. In total 120 women were selected by random sampling method and the required data was collected by through questionnaire for which the alpha coefficient for various scales was over 0.7. SPSS software was used for the data analysis. The results indicated that, as viewed from the viewpoint of rural womeninvolved in thestudy, the effectiveness of theprogram was estimated as 28.4 percent.