The research, led by Md. Salman Syed Sani of Shahjalal University of Science and Technology together with colleagues at the University of Dhaka, focused on Gulistan and Gulshan-2, two commercial hubs that could hardly be more different. Gulistan, under Dhaka South City Corporation, is a dense, chaotic transport node packed with roadside stalls and small-scale enterprises heavily dependent on public transport. Gulshan-2, under Dhaka North City Corporation, is a more planned commercial-residential district with better infrastructure and a more established business class. The stakes of the comparison are enormous: micro, small and medium-sized enterprises contribute roughly a quarter of Bangladesh’s GDP and employ close to eighty percent of its workforce, yet their owners’ and workers’ mobility has been almost entirely invisible in urban transport research.

To capture that hidden population, the team surveyed 384 respondents, split evenly between the two districts, using a sample size calculated with Cochran’s formula at a ninety-five percent confidence level. Between April and October 2024, researchers approached business owners and employees directly at their workplaces during business hours, gathering data on education, income, business structure, residential location, commuting distance, travel time, transport mode and expenditure. Two focus group discussions, one in each district, added qualitative depth. The analysis combined descriptive statistics, multiple regression, Principal Component Analysis and geospatial mapping in SPSS, MS Excel and ArcGIS, an integrated toolkit designed to connect individual circumstances with the spatial structure of the city.

The demographic contrasts were stark from the outset. Gulistan’s workforce is young, with forty-eight percent of respondents aged between twenty and thirty, and education concentrated at primary and secondary levels. Gulshan’s workers are older, more educated and far more settled: thirty percent reported more than ten years in the same business, and thirty-seven percent had never changed jobs, compared with just twenty percent in Gulistan. Gulistan workers, by contrast, are chronic movers, with seventy-two percent reporting job changes within the same zone and half reporting three job changes in the past decade. In Gulistan, relocation decisions were driven mainly by business location, financial improvement and workplace relationships; in Gulshan, business location dominated, but residential location and better job preferences played larger supporting roles.

Residential patterns told a similar story of divergence. Ninety percent of Gulshan workers live in central city locations close to their workplaces, clustered in neighbourhoods such as Natun Bazar, Badda, Banasree and Shahjadpur, and typically within five to ten kilometres of work. Gulistan workers are far more dispersed: fourteen percent live in outer suburban areas, and some commute from districts as distant as Narayanganj and Munshiganj. Fifteen percent of Gulistan workers travel more than thirty kilometres to work, and thirty percent commute between ten and twenty kilometres. The consequence is a transport profile dominated by buses, which carry fifty-six percent of Gulistan commuters, followed by informal leguna minibuses at eighteen percent and rickshaws at fifteen percent. Gulshan workers, living closer, rely far more on walking and non-motorized transport.

The financial burden follows the same gradient. Nearly a third of Gulistan workers spend between 1,000 and 1,500 taka per month on commuting, and a quarter spend between 2,000 and 3,000 taka, significant sums for low-income earners. Focus group participants described the trade-offs in blunt terms. One Gulistan employee explained that affordable housing near the commercial area is nearly impossible to find, forcing a daily long-distance commute. Another reported choosing slower, cheaper transport options to keep expenses down, while a third said peak-hour congestion often doubles travel time and makes a regular work schedule difficult to maintain. Gulshan participants, by contrast, described commutes that, while not congestion-free, are at least predictable, and some said paying more for reliable transport is a worthwhile investment in efficiency.

The statistical core of the study delivered its most striking finding. Principal Component Analysis extracted five components explaining ninety-two percent of the total variance in the data, and when those components were fed into a logistic regression classifier, the model distinguished Gulistan from Gulshan respondents with ninety-four percent accuracy. The first component, dominated by business scale and economic capacity, separated smaller, informal, foot-traffic-dependent enterprises in Gulistan from larger, more formal and better-connected businesses in Gulshan. In effect, the analysis showed that mobility inequality in Dhaka is not randomly distributed but structurally embedded in the geography of the two districts, so much so that a worker’s commuting and business profile alone can identify which district they work in.

Yet the regression models delivered a humbling lesson about what actually determines commuting time. Education, age, income and transport mode all failed to reach statistical significance once other factors were controlled. Only two variables mattered: sex, at the ten percent significance level, and commuting distance, which was highly significant at the one percent level. The models explained roughly eighteen and twenty-three percent of the variance in commuting time for Gulistan and Gulshan respectively. The authors interpret this through the lens of Hägerstrand’s time-geography and the Alonso-Muth urban location model: in a city as congested as Dhaka, congestion, road conditions and residential-workplace mismatch impose constraints that cut across socio-economic groups, while lower educational attainment can indirectly restrict housing choices, pushing workers to the periphery and lengthening their journeys. The researchers are careful to note that only the direct effects of distance and sex are statistically supported; the wider causal chain remains a theoretically informed interpretation.

Perhaps the most distinctive insight concerns entrepreneurs themselves. Business owners, especially those managing multiple premises, consistently prioritized commercial accessibility over residential convenience. Participants explained that they choose business locations based on customer demand and established supplier relationships, even when that means travelling farther from home, and that changing residence is easier than relocating a business whose customers and suppliers are already anchored in place. This inverts the assumptions of conventional commuting studies, which treat the workplace as fixed and the residence as the adjustable variable. For small business owners, the reverse is often true, and any transport policy that ignores the gravitational pull of customer networks will misread the mobility behaviour of a huge share of Dhaka’s workforce.

The policy implications are correspondingly place-specific. In Gulistan, the authors argue, priority should go to improving the reliability, affordability and coordination of buses, legunas and rickshaws, along with safer boarding areas and better connections from peripheral districts. In Gulshan, the challenge is protective: preserving continuous footpaths, safe crossings and first- and last-mile connections against the encroachment of parking and construction. At the metropolitan scale, the study calls for mixed-use development paired with affordable rental housing near commercial centres, since proximity alone helps no one who cannot afford to live there. Gender-disaggregated transport data, delivery access for multi-location businesses, and coordinated monitoring by the two city corporations round out the recommendations. What the study ultimately demonstrates is that mobility inequality is not only a problem between cities or social classes; it can be manufactured, block by block, within a single metropolis, and fixing it requires reading the fine grain of the urban fabric itself.

Subject of Research: Intra-urban mobility and commuting patterns of small business owners and employees in Dhaka's commercial districts

Article Title: Assessing the influence of intra-urban mobility on small business dynamics in Gulistan and Gulshan commercial areas of Dhaka

Article References: Sani, M. S. S., Rahman, M. M., & Labib, M. I. H. (2026). Assessing the influence of intra-urban mobility on small business dynamics in Gulistan and Gulshan commercial areas of Dhaka. Discover Cities, 3(1), Article 196. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44327-026-00375-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44327-026-00375-0

Keywords: Dhaka, intra-urban mobility, small business, MSMEs, commuting behavior, urban planning, transport geography, residential location, principal component analysis, spatial inequality, public transport, Bangladesh

The scale of Zimbabwe’s small business sector makes the question more than academic. The country counts roughly 3.4 million micro, small and medium enterprises, yet only about 14 percent of them are formally registered. Together these businesses employ around three million adults and contribute approximately 8.6 billion US dollars to the gross domestic product. More than three quarters of them operate in just two sectors: agriculture, which accounts for about 39 percent, and retail, which accounts for roughly 38 percent. Midlands Province alone is home to an estimated 432,000 such enterprises, making it an ideal natural laboratory for asking what allows small firms to survive and grow amid chronic macroeconomic instability, currency turbulence and recurring climate shocks.

The research team, led by Felix Tete of Midlands State University together with Conrad Murendo and Laurine Chikoko, designed their survey to capture resilience as a measurable, multidimensional property rather than an abstract virtue. Drawing on established frameworks in the entrepreneurship literature, they defined resilience as the capacity of an enterprise to absorb, adapt to and recover from economic, environmental and institutional shocks while maintaining or improving performance over time. Because such a capacity cannot be observed directly, the researchers administered twelve survey items covering attributes such as adaptability, coping, problem-solving under stress, the ability to face setbacks, functional continuity and recovery capacity. Each item was rated on a seven-point scale and then converted into a binary indicator, with agreement coded as one and everything else as zero.

To distill these twelve indicators into a single usable number, the team turned to principal component analysis, a statistical technique that compresses correlated variables into a smaller set of components while preserving as much of the original variance as possible. The first principal component, with an eigenvalue of 5.6, explained a substantial share of the total variance and was retained as the resilience index. The diagnostic statistics were unusually strong: the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy reached 0.90, well above the 0.80 threshold generally considered suitable, and Cronbach’s alpha came in at 0.90, indicating high internal consistency among the items. A scree plot showed a clean inflection point after the first eigenvalue, supporting the choice of a single resilience construct. A parallel procedure produced an entrepreneurship index from seven indicators, including business registration, asset accumulation, engagement with value chain actors, business development training and market linkages.

Data collection took place in May 2023 using interviewer-administered questionnaires delivered through the KOBO Collect platform, with research assistants working in English and Shona. The sampling followed a multi-stage design: four districts, Chirumanzu, Gweru, Shurugwi and Mberengwa, were purposively selected to span urban commercial influence and predominantly rural agricultural settings with differing exposure to climatic and market shocks, and enterprises were then randomly sampled from ward-level business registers compiled with the help of agricultural extension officers. A standard sample-size calculation pointed to 384 respondents; the team enlarged the sample to about 492 to offset non-response. The analysis was framed around four hypotheses, positing that resilience, internal financial resources, entrepreneurship and a conducive external environment would each independently boost performance, measured by annual income.

The headline result is striking in its clarity. In an ordinary least squares regression of log annual income, resilience carried a positive and statistically significant coefficient, with an exponentiated estimate of 1.09 at p less than 0.01. Interpreted in percentage terms, each one-unit increase in the resilience index was associated with roughly a nine percent rise in annual income, holding all other factors constant. The model explained about 22.5 percent of the variation in enterprise performance and was highly significant overall. Before settling on that specification, the researchers ran a battery of diagnostic checks: variance inflation factors stayed well below the threshold of 10, ruling out problematic multicollinearity, and a Breusch-Pagan/Cook-Weisberg test flagged heteroscedasticity in raw income that a logarithmic transformation cured, dropping the test’s p-value to a comfortable 0.27. A Ramsey RESET test found no evidence of omitted variables.

Two other factors proved nearly as important as resilience itself. Enterprises that described their operating environment as conducive, a composite of institutional, infrastructural, locational and macroeconomic conditions, earned about 26 percent more than those facing hostile conditions, an effect significant at the five percent level. Financial resources mattered even more directly: an increase in asset value, the study’s proxy for internal capital, was associated with a 21 percent gain in annual income. These findings echo a substantial international literature linking working capital to small-firm growth, and they carry particular weight in a country where collateral requirements, thin credit information systems and weak financial infrastructure routinely lock small businesses out of formal lending. Intriguingly, business age showed a weak negative association with income, hinting that older firms may drift toward stagnation without continued innovation.

Equally telling were the results that failed to materialize. The owner’s age, gender, education, marital status, ownership structure, employee count, licensing status and the composite entrepreneurship index all showed no statistically significant effect on income once resilience, environment and capital were accounted for. The predominant shock of the preceding two years, COVID-19, likewise did not register as an independent predictor in the final model. This pattern suggests that in a volatile rural economy, structural adaptability and liquid resources may swamp individual demographic characteristics: what a business can do when the ground shifts matters more than who owns it on paper. The authors caution, however, that their cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time, that income alone is a narrow measure of performance, and that self-reported, recall-based data carry inherent bias risks.

The policy implications are concrete. The researchers call for deliberate resilience-building interventions that strengthen adaptive capacity and shock recovery, alongside financial literacy training, business advisory services and expanded access to appropriate financing, with Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Women Affairs, Community, Small and Medium Enterprises Development positioned as a key actor alongside private and civil-society partners. Just as critical, they argue, is a stable and predictable macroeconomic environment, since regulatory certainty and policy coherence are preconditions for small enterprises to plan and invest at all. Future work, they note, should include comparative analyses across provinces and, crucially, panel studies that can disentangle cause from effect and track how resilience translates into income over time. For the millions of Zimbabweans whose livelihoods hang on the survival of a farm-supply shop or rural trading kiosk, the study offers a data-driven answer to an old question: the businesses that bend without breaking are the ones that earn.

Subject of Research: The effect of enterprise resilience on the performance of rural agricultural and retail micro, small and medium enterprises in Zimbabwe

Article Title: Impact of resilience on performance of agricultural and retail micro, small and medium enterprises in Midlands Province, Zimbabwe

Article References: Tete, F., Murendo, C., & Chikoko, L. (2026). Impact of resilience on performance of agricultural and retail micro, small and medium enterprises in Midlands Province, Zimbabwe. BMC Agriculture, 2(1), Article 10. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44399-026-00033-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44399-026-00033-1

Keywords: resilience, MSMEs, Zimbabwe, rural enterprises, agriculture, retail, enterprise performance, principal component analysis, financial access, business environment, entrepreneurship, Midlands Province

The research, conducted by Tejinder Singh Lakhwani of Manipal University Jaipur and Ettishri B. Rajput of the National Institute of Fashion Technology in Gandhinagar, proposes a blockchain-enabled framework tailored specifically to India’s MSME-driven apparel ecosystem. Rather than treating blockchain as a one-size-fits-all solution imported from large Western supply chains, the authors designed their framework around the realities of Indian production clusters: intermittent connectivity, limited digital literacy, and deeply entrenched paper-based workflows. The work was supported by the Ministry of Education and the Government of India, and the authors report that open access funding was provided by Manipal University Jaipur.

At the technical heart of the framework lies a layered data architecture that combines distributed ledger technology with Internet of Things (IoT) enabled tagging and QR-based verification. In the proposed system, each garment or batch of material acquires a digital identity at an early stage of production. IoT tags and QR codes attach physical goods to their digital twins, recording events such as fiber origin, dyeing processes, certification checks, and handoffs between suppliers. Because the resulting records are written to a blockchain, they become tamper-evident: no single participant, however powerful, can quietly rewrite the history of a product to conceal counterfeit inputs or unsustainable practices. Smart contracts, self-executing programs stored on the ledger, automate parts of the workflow, releasing payments or verifying certifications only when predefined conditions are met, thereby reducing the reliance on intermediaries and manual audits.

The researchers adopted a design science research-oriented exploratory approach, moving through three stages: conceptual framework design, pilot implementation across apparel clusters linked to the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), and qualitative stakeholder evaluation based on interviews and thematic analysis. ONDC, India’s government-backed digital commerce network, served as a useful testbed because it already connects a wide range of sellers and buyers on a common digital rails system. Embedding blockchain-based traceability into ONDC-linked clusters allowed the team to observe how the technology performs in authentic commercial settings rather than idealized laboratory conditions.

The pilot findings were cautiously encouraging. Participants reported improvements in inventory visibility, documentation visibility, certification transparency, and, critically, stakeholder trust. Verification processes that once required chasing paperwork across multiple offices became faster through QR authentication, and smart contract-supported workflows reduced documentation inconsistencies that had previously plagued coordination between buyers and suppliers. In an industry where counterfeit raw materials and forged sustainability certifications remain persistent risks, the ability to scan a QR code and retrieve an immutable production history represents a meaningful shift in how trust is established. Instead of trusting the word of an unknown supplier halfway up the chain, brands and consumers can trust the mathematics of the ledger itself.

The study’s authors are careful, however, not to overstate the results. This was an exploratory pilot, evaluated through qualitative interviews rather than large-scale quantitative trials, and the findings reflect perceptions of improvement rather than statistically measured outcomes. Thematic analysis of stakeholder interviews surfaced substantial barriers that could easily derail adoption at scale. Digital literacy limitations were prominent: many workers and small-firm owners in informal clusters had never used smartphone-based verification tools, and some lacked the literacy needed to navigate even simplified interfaces. Infrastructural constraints, including unreliable internet connectivity and inadequate hardware, further complicated deployment in the very clusters where traceability is most needed.

Stakeholder resistance emerged as another significant theme. Participants in the study noted that informal supply chain environments run on relationships, discretion, and sometimes opacity, and that mandatory digital record-keeping can be perceived as surveillance, added cost, or a threat to established intermediaries whose role depends on information asymmetry. Small enterprises worried about the cost of tags, training, and compliance, while others questioned whether buyers would actually pay premiums for verified ethical sourcing. These findings underscore a recurring lesson in technology-for-development research: the hardest problems are rarely technical. A distributed ledger is only as strong as the willingness of the people feeding data into it, and if MSMEs do not see clear economic value, the system risks becoming an empty shell with verifiable records of nothing meaningful.

In response to these barriers, the authors propose a set of India-specific design principles that could shape future deployments. Mobile-first interfaces are essential, given that smartphones are the primary computing device in most production clusters. Vernacular-language support, allowing workers to interact with verification tools in regional Indian languages rather than English, was highlighted as a key enabler of inclusive adoption. The researchers also emphasize policy alignment, arguing that blockchain traceability frameworks should dovetail with existing government digital infrastructure and sustainability compliance regimes rather than operating as parallel, disconnected systems. By anchoring the framework to ONDC and aligning it with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) compliance demands from international buyers, the study sketches a pathway by which traceability could become a shared public utility rather than a private luxury of large export houses.

The broader implications extend well beyond apparel. Emerging economies around the world face similar combinations of fragmented production, informal labor, and mounting pressure from global buyers to prove ethical and sustainable sourcing. Textile and apparel supply chains have become a particular flashpoint following international regulations on forced labor, deforestation-linked inputs, and greenwashing claims, all of which demand verifiable chain-of-custody data. If a blockchain framework can be made to work in the messy, low-margin, high-fragmentation environment of Indian MSME clusters, the same design principles, mobile-first, vernacular-enabled, and policy-aligned, could plausibly transfer to agriculture, handicrafts, leather, and other sectors where traceability has historically been aspirational rather than operational.

The study also contributes to a growing scholarly conversation about how transparency technologies interact with existing power structures. Distributed ledgers do not automatically distribute power; they record whatever participants choose to write, and the governance of who gets to write, read, and validate data matters as much as the cryptography underneath. By focusing on MSME integration rather than merely brand-side visibility, the Indian framework attempts to flip the usual script, treating small suppliers as active participants in a shared data infrastructure rather than as passive endpoints of corporate monitoring. Whether that vision survives contact with commercial reality remains an open question, but the pilot offers a concrete, empirically grounded starting point. As the authors conclude, blockchain-enabled traceability in emerging economies will succeed not through technology alone, but through thoughtfully designed solutions that respect the digital, linguistic, and institutional realities of the millions of small producers who actually make the world’s clothes.

Subject of Research: Blockchain-enabled transparency and traceability for ethical sourcing and MSME integration in the Indian apparel supply chain

Article Title: Blockchain enabled transparency and traceability for ethical sourcing and MSME integration in the Indian apparel supply chain

Article References: Lakhwani, T. S., & Rajput, E. B. (2026). Blockchain enabled transparency and traceability for ethical sourcing and MSME integration in the Indian apparel supply chain. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04444-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04444-7

Keywords: blockchain, apparel supply chain, traceability, ethical sourcing, IoT, India, MSMEs, smart contracts, ONDC, ESG compliance, sustainability, supply chain management