Effectiveness of Community Approaches for Millet-based Entrepreneurial Promotion in Odisha, India

Abstract

Millets are emerging as a powerful solution for tackling malnutrition and promoting economic development in rural communities. Milletpreneurship is a key to reduce poverty, sustaining livelihoods and fostering agricultural resilience. Community approaches are critical for promoting milletpreneurship, yet empirical evidence on their effectiveness remains limited. This study addresses how diverse stakeholders’ interactions influence entrepreneurial outcomes in the millet value chain. 120 purposively selected milletpreneurs engaged in millet production and enterprises across the value chain of high millet producing areas of Odisha were interviewed in the year 2024. Thirteen effectiveness indicators were developed through expert judgement using a normalization method. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) technique was used, validated through Kaiser-Mayer-Olkin (KMO=0.934) and Bartlett’s test (  ²=1324.788, p<0.001), revealed that individual entrepreneurial competencies like leadership ability, fund management and risk orientation drove 64.1% of the variance in perceived effectiveness. While 41.7% perceived moderate effectiveness and 26.6% high effectiveness, 72.1% cumulative variance suggested heterogeneous community profiles. Results indicated deficiencies in social media exposure and marketing channels. Policymakers need to intervene through capacity building in financial management and leadership development, multidimensional support integrating infrastructure, finance and market linkage and differentiated interventions acknowledging diverse operational realities rather than uniform approaches.