Cooperatives and the empowerment of disabled people: the case of Zamani Disabled People’s Organization in Esikhawini, Kwa-Zulu Natal

Abstract
The study was about cooperatives and the empowerment of disabled people. It investigated the extent in which participation, capacitation and satisfaction with management contribute in enabling cooperatives to empower disabled people. The Capability Approach proposed that the most vital thing to deliberate when valuing well-being is what people are actually able to do. Capacitation to disadvantaged people is very important in that it ensures services and assistants directly meet their needs. Participatory planning can be regarded as an instrument for identifying the needs of all persons within a community, a way of constructing harmony, and means of empowering deprived or marginalised groups. Empowerment is a varied practices enabling people to maintain themselves by providing power that they might use in dealing with issues they declare important. Satisfaction with management is determined by the work environments that satisfy the social, economic and personal fundamentals of the individual. Benefit of membership is a combination of personal adaptive technologies and modifications in a workplace attitudes and configurations can enable even those who have very significant impairments to work effectively. The assimilation of Perceived Level of Empowerment (PERLEMP), Perceived Level of Participation (PERLEPAR), and Perceived Level of Capacitation (PERLECA) showed that Satisfaction with Management of a Cooperative (SAMACO) mediates on Perceived Benefits of Membership (PERBEME). Thus the study showed that benefit of membership in a cooperative is determined by participation, capacitation and satisfaction with management of a cooperative. The study hypothesised that perceived participation, capacitation, empowerment and satisfaction with management will determine the benefit of membership in a cooperative. Where disabled people seek empowerment they will join a cooperative. Where they seek their benefit in a cooperative, they will consider their level of participation, empowerment, capacitation and satisfaction with management will as well be considered. A survey was conducted using a Five-Level Likert scale to decipher respondents‟ perceptions of level of participation, empowerment, capacitation, satisfaction with management and perceived benefits. In the beginning of analysis, responses (N=28) were reduced using Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to determine how questionnaire items contributed to variables under consideration. Afterwards, variables extracted were correlated and regressed. While bivariate correlation was used to test the simple relationship between variables. A linear regression analysis was used to describe how satisfaction with management mediates the relationship between participation, empowerment and capacitation. MANCOVA was used to test the mediation effects of independent variables PERLEPAR, PERLEMP and PERLECA. The results showed that PERLECA was the desired description for cooperatives for the empowerment of disabled people at Zamani Disabled People‟s Organization. On the basis of the results, cooperatives have a potential of empowering disabled people and that is achieved through democratic operation, where members equally participate in the daily business and inclusion in decision-making.
Description
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Sociology at the University of Zululand, South Africa, 2017
Keywords
cooperatives --empowerment --disabled
Citation
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