Investigating the role of diversifying economic activities on the sustainable livelihood of villagers (case study: Rasht county)
Mahdi Jafari
1
(
Phd. Student, Department of Geography and Rural Planning, Rasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Rasht, Iran.
)
Teimour Amar
2
(
Associate Professor, Islamic Azad University, Rasht Branch
)
Mohamma Baset Ghoryshi Minabad
3
(
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Rural Planning, Rasht Branch, Islamic Azad University, Rasht, Iran.
)
Keywords: Village, sustainable livelihood, economic activity, Rasht county,
Abstract :
The economic and job structure in rural areas is facing obstacles, that the most important of them are less flexibility in the face of short-term weather fluctuations, product price fluctuations at the time of harvest, lack of proper supervision and control by dealers, destruction of basic natural resources, lack of job security, low level of quality of life and finally unstable rural livelihood. Therefore, the diversification of economic activities in rural areas is one of the new approaches to face this livelihood instability, and the purpose of this research is to investigate the role of diversification of economic activities on the sustainable livelihood of the villagers of Rasht county. In this regard, the research method in the current research is quantitative with an applied purpose and a causal-correlation nature. The statistical population of the research is the heads of rural households in Rasht county (69,789 people), and using Morgan's formula with sampling error (0.05), the sample size is estimated to be 382 people. Also stratified random sampling was used to select the sample size from the villages of the city. Also, data analysis was done using Phi, Cramer, Kruskal-Wallis, one-sample t-test, Pearson correlation and regression coefficient in SPSS26 software. The findings of the research show that there is a significant relationship between the number of activities and the level of education and between the changes in income resulting from shocks and the amount of income (P<0.000). The stability of livelihood in all aspects of livelihood is low in the studied area. Also, there is a positive and significant relationship between diversification and structures and processes with sustainable livelihoods, and a significant negative relationship between shocks and stresses with sustainable livelihoods (P<0.000).