Paper Title
GENDER ATTITUDE ON ACCESS TO FARM PRODUCTIVE RESOURCES AMONG WOMEN FARMERS IN AWKA NORTH COMMUNITIES OF SOUTH EASTERN NIGERIA

Abstract
There seems to be a tendency to discriminate against women with regard to access to and use of farm productive resources owing to gender-related attitudes, dispositions, norms, values or practices. Hence, this research was carried out to ascertain what the situation is in Awka North communities which are rural communities with farming as the mainstay of the economy. Data was collected using a questionnaire which has two parts; the first part consisting of nine question items on the socio-economic characteristic of the respondents who are drawn from the farmers� cooperatives in the concerned communities, while the second part is made up of seven major question items. The cooperatives have a total of 1002 members, this size was reduced to 286 using Taro Yamane�s sampling formula with e = 0.05. The response options were weighted using the four-point Likert scale (4,3,2,1) with cut off point 2.5. The six hypotheses developed were tested using the normal distribution Z test statistic at a 5% significance level.. The following results were obtained: gender attitude has a very significant influence on ownership of farmlands by women farmers in the said Awka North communities but has no significant influence on access to credit facilities, agricultural extension services, value adding agricultural inputs and modern agricultural technologies by the women farmers. Moreover, gender attitude (deriving from traditional norms and values) has significant influence on freedom to produce any type of crops by women farmers in the said communities.