Social Implications of Women Organizations in Conflict Resolution and Community Development in Selected Communities of South-East, Nigeria

Abstract

Peace is the most valuable and highly pursued phenomenon which remains a yardstick for achieving socio-economic, political, cultural, and religious development of local, national and international communities. Yet, it is often eluded. The paper, therefore, examined the social implications of women's organizations in conflict resolution in some selected communities in the South East, Nigeria. It was guided by four specific objectives and their corresponding research question variables which included finding out if women were involved in conflict resolution; if their involvement in conflict resolution had restored peace; brought about development and the challenges encountered in those communities. The population was 300 while the sample size was 200 was randomly selected. Two communities from each of the selected states were purposively chosen which include Imo, Abia, Anambra and Enugu for equal socio-cultural and organizational representation. The method was a cross-sectional design. Mixed method was used, both quantitative and qualitative methods which included questionnaire and Focus Group Discussion to get information from these women. They used to incorporate the opinions of both useful literate and illiterate respondents. A Structured Questionnaire was used to collect data from the randomly selected women while FGD was carried out on leaders of those women's organizations. Data were analyzed using the statistical package for social sciences version 20.0 which includes simple percentages, and frequency distribution tables. The chi-square statistic was used to test the hypotheses which were tested at 0.05 significant level. One of the findings was that women were involved in conflict resolutions which served as a ground for social, economic and cultural developments in those communities. Social responsibility theory was the theoretical framework adopted. It was discovered from the study that women have various groups in their communities where they participate actively in conflict resolution arising both at intra and inter-group levels and the communities at large which resulted in restoring peace and corporate existence among members of these communities thereby serving as the basis for establishing some developmental projects. However, irrespective of these laudable imprints of development made by these women, the study discovered that these women encountered some challenges which included cultural inhibition, unnecessary influence of patriarchy, suspicion of wives by their husbands and poor financial prowess among other challenges. Some recommendations made include eroding some cultures that exclude women from the decision-making process. The finding of this paper is that south-east women brought socio-economic and cultural developments through these social organizations in their respective communities.