| Bangladesh has a core competency in jute production.Jute industry contributed to the economy of Bangladesh from the pre liberation(Pakistan period)and post-liberation.At present,many jute mills have closed due to negative profit.For this reason thousands of workers and employees became jobless and many jute growers became reluctant to grow jute.The situation looks very terrible because of many people became unemployed rural and urban area.The main focus of this study is to evaluate the issues of jute micro-enterprises development and its contributions.The study also aims to advocate policies and recommendations for enhancing competitiveness of enterprises in manufacturing eco-friendly jute products and jute based micro-enterprises for sustainable jute sector in BangladeshMicro-enterprises in the jute industry are located in different areas in Bangladesh,especially in Dhaka,Narshingdi,Rangpur,Tangail,Joshore,Chittagong areas.Four zones were selected purposively as the locale of the study such as Dhaka;Narshingdi;Rangpur;and Tangail.The study employed a research design of mixed methodology.One hundred fifty jute micro-enterprises were considered conveniently as the required sample of the study.This study has conducted 12 in-depth Interviews with jute micro entrepreneurs and 14 key informants were selected by following snowballing technique to explore the real situation of micro-enterprises in the jute industry.Furthermore,four focus group discussions(FGD)have been conducted to explore value exchanges between jute micro-enterprises and stakeholders at different clusters of the study area.The researcher also has examined few case studies to investigate shared value exchange between jute micro-enterprises and stakeholders under the study areas.The qualitative investigation shows that the country has failed to develop basic resource to specialised resources such as raw jute to diversified use,developed labour resources to skilled work force,unable to develop innovative design and products,reducing production cost of jute compared to substitute,It has been noticed that there is lack of collaboration among organizations due to lack of understanding.Only Jute Diversification Promotion Centre is working for them with the limited resources such as they have no own training manual,no product design centre Furthermore,only six Jute entrepreneurs service centre for enterprise of the whole country.JDPC's have only two Raw Materials Bank(RMB).It reflects very poor arrangements in supplying fabrics as raw materials.There is no policy for the development of jute based micro-enterprises.This study has also noted that the existing jute micro-enterprises development approach is not bottom up approach.The demographic results of the study shows that the youth people are more involved with jute micro-enterprises,particularly women are also involved in this entrepreneurship.Jute micro-enterprises are nature of sole proprietorship and most of them operate their business in residential area.This study also found that jute micro-enterprises are getting popularity among the rural people.It has also found that 96%entrepreneurs have started their venture with their personal savings,which indicate that some initial amount of capital is required for this business.About 76.7%entrepreneurs collect their raw materials from Raw material Bank(RMB)of Jute Diversification Promotion Centre.They have little access to private and government jute mills.Most of them do not have access to overseas market.The category of products in product line is only about 9 categories which is not a satisfactory scenario for value added based enterprises.Business practice is important precondition for business success or better performance.We have noticed that jute micro-enterprises are maintaining quality and compliances in their business that means they are conscious about quality of the products.In addition,they have less practice in effective marketing,financial and accounting activities.But these activities are very much essential for better business performance.In qualitative study,it has been found that they use eco-slogan or words to attract customers.The study has found that 67.33%jute micro-enterprises exhibit moderate performance where 17.34%and 15.33%revealed low and high business performance respectively.The regression analysis of this study showed that overall business performance is highly influenced with education,tanning received,access to foreign customers and business practices.The study also discovers unexpected situation which is considered as constraints of jute micro-enterprises development such as specialised human resource related to constraints such as lack of skilled designers and workers,high cost of skilled workers and lack of training facilities,financial and resources constraints:lack of loan facilities,lack of raw materials,shortage of quality fabrics,high price of raw materials and long process of loan approval,physical resources constraints:price and shortage supply of utility,supporting factories like laminating and dying facilities,marketing and policy inputs:access to foreign customers,incentives of JDPs,moderrn equipments and research facilities.In short,the study comes to terms on that the growth and development of the jute micro-enterprises is being hindered due to failing of conversion the natural resources to specialised resources,lack of institutional and policy supports and average business performance due to several constraints.Finally,it is also noticed that jute micro-enterprises create absolute green shared value(GSV)what the large jute mills of Bangladesh did not do ever.The study offers a proposed business model for promoting jute micro-enterprises development which is completely bottom-up approach and named as"green change approach'.The model considers enterprise development by the jute famers or jute farmers association.It will run with "Not only profit maximization but also social welfare maximization". |
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