The role of cooperatives established in rural areas in women's empowerment: The case of Manisa

In terms of empowering women, cooperatives have an important potential. For this reason, there has been an increasing interest in women's cooperatives in Turkey in recent years. In many development plans, women's cooperatives are referred to as a tool for women's participation in employment. The theoretical background of this study is based on which are from women and development approaches, Gender and Development approach, and the Women, Environment and Development approach. The focus of the study is the concept of empowerment. It aims to reveal how women shape their behaviors as a result of their experiences inside and outside the cooperative by accessing the knowledge of women in cooperatives in rural areas, and to reveal the relationship of this situation with women's empowerment. The field research of the study was implemented in Manisa province. In total, face-to-face interviews were conducted with the partner or beneficiary women of thirteen women's cooperatives. The data obtained because of the interviews were analyzed with the MAXQDA, which is a qualitative analysis program. In this context, the study consists of five chapters. In the first part, there is an introduction part including how the research was decided by the researcher and research questions, the literature related to the research topic, the purpose, importance, and method of the research. In the second part, approaches that form the theoretical framework of the research and include women in development thinking are included. The third chapter deals with the current situation of cooperatives and women's cooperatives in the world and in Turkey. While the fourth section contains information about the design of the research field, the fifth section includes the findings obtained from the research field. Accordingly, two separate analyzes were conducted in the study, including cooperative analysis and empowerment analysis. In the analysis of the cooperative, information about the structures and characteristics of the cooperatives, their partner profiles, their main fields of activity, production and marketing strategies, their internal functioning and problems are included. In the empowerment analysis, the main tendencies identified regarding the empowerment experiences of women who are cooperative partners or beneficiaries in Soma district are discussed. Key Words: Women's Cooperative, Empowerment, Development, Manisa, Rural Area