A Tool to Measure the Resilience Espoused by Agripreneurs on COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The unpredicted COVID-19 pandemic devastatingly challenged the business life of agripreneurs.  Agripreneurs are the entrepreneurs holding their main business in agriculture or agriculture allied. The pandemic affected millions of businesses economically and shut down their production chains. It is the era of advocating resilience to make a transition and to sustain the post-COVID. The purpose of the research is to construct a composite pandemic resilience index to measure the resilience followed by agripreneurs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The index was developed by reviewing the available literature and judge’s relevancy ratings. A relevancy score of more than 0.75 was selected and the Pandemic Resilience Index (PRI) was finalized yielding six indicators viz., pandemic response, support and assistance, agripreneurial skills, pandemic risk prevention and mitigation, business reconstruction, and pandemic preparedness. The PRI also had high reliability (α=0.838). The content validity of the index was 3.37, which is higher than 2.50, indicating the index is valid. The Pandemic Resilience index will act as a valid instrument to identify different resilient strategies adopted by agripreneurs to regulate and rebuild the business at the toughest times of the pandemic. PRI will also help us to understand how an agripreneur has to be resilient in order to cope with the unforeseeable occurrences of upcoming pandemics.