The entrepreneurship potential of rural areas: soap production as a side business for Tanzanian rice farmers

Purpose: This study examines soap production’s entrepreneurship potential and profitability as a supplementary business for rural rice farmers in Tanzania to promote their economic independence.Design/ Methodology/ Approach: We randomly sampled and interviewed about ten smallscale soap manufacturers in urban Tanzania gathered from 2019-2021 to develop a soap production business strategy for rural farmers at a similar scale. Considering the Voronoi theory, we calculated the distance from the rural areas to urban centres to determine the transportation costs, which particularly burden rural farmers. Soap production costs and profitability were determined based on transportation costs and raw material prices.Findings: Rural farmers would incur high transportation costs, given the high average distance to the nearest urban centre (sometimes > 100 km). Nevertheless, producing their rice bran oil, valuable raw material for soap production, would give them a competitive advantage over urban producers.Research Limitation: The study’s proposed strategy can be applied to similar contexts to reduce the urban-rural entrepreneurship divide.Practical Implication: Soaps made using rice bran oil help farmers reuse agricultural waste. Their active ingredients also increase their marketability as high-end cosmetic products, providing farmers with additional income.Social Implication: Commercializing agricultural residues such as rice bran increases farmers’ revenues and reduces CO2 emissions by preventing the residues’ incineration; this creates a virtuous cycle in society.Originality/ Value: This study presents a more realistic business strategy for rural Tanzanian farmers, as, unlike previous studies, it considers not only direct costs but also transportation costs

Electroweak Supersymmetry with an Approximate U(1)_PQ

A predictive framework for supersymmetry at the TeV scale is presented, which incorporates the Ciafaloni-Pomarol mechanism for the dynamical determination of the \mu parameter of the MSSM. It is replaced by (\lambda S), where S is a singlet field, and the axion becomes a heavy pseudoscalar, G, by adding a mass, m_G, by hand. The explicit breaking of Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry is assumed to be sufficiently weak at the TeV scale that the only observable consequence is the mass m_G. Three models for the explicit PQ breaking are given; but the utility of this framework is that the predictions for all physics at the electroweak scale are independent of the particular model for PQ breaking. Our framework leads to a theory similar to the MSSM, except that \mu is predicted by the Ciafaloni-Pomarol relation, and there are light, weakly-coupled states in the spectrum. The production and cascade decay of superpartners at colliders occurs as in the MSSM, except that there is one extra stage of the cascade chain, with the next-to-LSP decaying to its "superpartner" and \tilde{s}, dramatically altering the collider signatures for supersymmetry. The framework is compatible with terrestrial experiments and astrophysical observations for a wide range of m_G and . If G is as light as possible, 300 keV < m_G < 3 MeV, it can have interesting effects on the radiation energy density during the cosmological eras of nucleosynthesis and acoustic oscillation, leading to predictions for N_{\nu BBN} and N_{\nu CMB} different from 3.Comment: 45 pages, 2 colour figures, a reference added, minor correction