Analysis of Barriers against Development of Rural Entrepreneurship in Guilan Province

Entrepreneurship is important to the alleviation of poverty and prevention of occupational burnout in rural communities. Barriers against rural entrepreneurship development in Guilan province in Iran was studied using the Delphi method in two rounds. The results of interviews and questionnaires were collected and assessed by 33 experts in the field of entrepreneurship. At the end of the second step, Kendall’s coefficient of concordance (W) was used to measure consensus among the experts about the barriers against rural entrepreneurship in Guilan at the end of the research rounds. The significance of the barriers was ranked using the fuzzy screening and SPSS 16 and Microsoft Excel 2010 software. The results indicated that the barriers can be divided into seven groups: individual and personality, financial and economic, socio-cultural, structural and environmental, policy-making, administrative (managerial), and educational barriers. The results show that the most influential factors are: policy-making with inconsistent executive planning and policies and lack of trust; improper codification of government economic and support policies created without consideration of the possible adverse effects; educational barriers created with a lack of knowledge about entrepreneurship on the part of the provincial authorities; lack of an entrepreneurial training system; and poor understanding of the rural population about design principles and initialization of new entrepreneurial businesses. It is possible to create a roadmap for entrepreneurship to advance opportunities and new values in this province by analysis of entrepreneurial development barriers at the village level in Guilan province