Agricultural Extension and Education
Hamid Rastegari; Zakaria Mohammadi Tamari; Maryam Sharifzadeh
Abstract
Nowadays, expanding entrepreneurship culture which depends on nurturing skills, abilities and entrepreneurial capabilities in societies and providing appropriate ethical business setting is regarded as one of the main factors for the economic development of societies. Thus, identifying entrepreneurial ...
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Nowadays, expanding entrepreneurship culture which depends on nurturing skills, abilities and entrepreneurial capabilities in societies and providing appropriate ethical business setting is regarded as one of the main factors for the economic development of societies. Thus, identifying entrepreneurial traits, skills, and abilities and particularly rural entrepreneurial competencies can be of great help to advance this issue. Therefore, the main objective of the present descriptive study is to identify and prioritize rural entrepreneurship skills. Key informants who participated in this research study were seven academic rural development experts who were selected based on Judgement (or Purposive) sampling to achieve theoretical saturation. The archival research technique was used to elicit and specify rural entrepreneurial skills, and then the structured protocols were used to collect information regarding the importance of the elicited skills. Data processing was done using the Artificial Neural Network technique in the MATLAB software. The results showed that social relationships, marketing and customer management skills, strategic planning, business startup and administration, and risk management ranked first to fifth, respectively. Among the five categories of entrepreneurship skills, “opportunity skills” and “management skills” ranked first and last, respectively. Some suggestions are provided in order to develop rural entrepreneurial skills based on the results obtained in this research study.
Agricultural Extension and Education
zakaria mohammadi tamari; mostafa ahmadvand
Abstract
The aim of this study was to investigate the current situation of social forestry in villages of Margon district in Boyer-Ahmad County. For data collection, were used two groups that consist of 15 forestry experts that they were selected with census and target sampling and 25 rural people that they were ...
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The aim of this study was to investigate the current situation of social forestry in villages of Margon district in Boyer-Ahmad County. For data collection, were used two groups that consist of 15 forestry experts that they were selected with census and target sampling and 25 rural people that they were selected with snowball sampling. For preparation of study instrument, the first, was acted out by focusing group interview with experts and exploratory interview with rural people and SWOT protocol in format of open-ended questions with them and according to that, 35 structured and unit Likret’s questionnaire prepared for two groups. Due to analyze of collected data, was used SPSS20 and Excel2010. Findings revealed that the main strengths of social forestry was various forest development projects such as Toba, and the other, groundwork for development of marginal activities such as beekeeping, fisheries and against, a key weakness was lack of funding and credits for developing social forestry. Furthermore, establishing an educational-scientific station with the aim at regenerating scion and developing ecotourism were the most valuable opportunity in the study area and in contrast, the lack of governmental management, monitoring and planning and illegal occupation of forest land, were the biggest threats in forestry villages of Margon district. Findings also showed that the social forestry in the area was in undesirable condition. Finally, due to improving social forestry in the study villages, the first implementing diverse strategy was recommended.
