Exploring ways to improve business resilience for micro entrepreneurs in the agricultural supply chain of Bangladesh

Abstract

Micro enterprises have struggled hard during the Covid 19 lockdowns. Most of them suffered because they weren’t allowed to stay open due to the lockdowns. However, despite the fact that agriculture-based businesses were allowed to remain open, micro enterprises in this category struggled to remain in business. Their suffering can be explained through various reasons including a lack of foot traffic among a multitude of other reasons which are explored in this paper. Our goal has not been to just explore the reasons for the suffering but to figure out ways in which such situations can be mitigated if or when such situations arise in future. To summarise, we have tried to explore ways to improve the business resilience for micro-enterprises in the agricultural supply chain of Bangladesh.

In order to achieve our goal for this paper, we had set a standard definition of micro-enterprises. The definition of micro-enterprise varies from country to country and also between various authoritative organisations. We have used the standards used by Bangladesh Bank to distinguish micro enterprises from other large-scale businesses. Next, we defined two methods which could be used to improve business resilience during times of pandemic like uncertain situations. The first method involved conducting risk mitigation activities on social media and the second one involved practising informal customer relationship management activities to build strong ties with customers. These two methods were used to set up two different hypothesis and their effectiveness in improving business resilience were tested. The dataset used for testing our hypothesis was collected from various parts of Bangladesh and included a good mixture of rural and urban microenterprises, thus providing a great overall picture. The data was then analysed via partial least square based structural equation modelling to draw conclusions. Based on our results, we have also come up with multiple recommendations that can help micro enterprises survive and even thrive during uncertain situations or in other words improve their business resilience.