This study explores how Depo Lestari, a woman-led, community-based hub in Banjarmasin, South Kalimantan, has emerged as a grassroots response to economic and cultural displacement caused by palm oil plantation expansion. Indigenous Banjar communities have experienced land dispossession and urban migration, leading to a breakdown in traditional livelihoods and social cohesion. Banjar women, in particular, face layered challenges—economic marginalization, gendered labor roles, and exclusion from mainstream development programs. Using a feminist qualitative methodology that includes in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, this research investigates how Depo Lestari functions as more than a retail outlet. It has become a learning space that facilitates informal economic education, emotional solidarity, and self-sufficiency for displaced women. The store embodies local values of halal, dignity, and reciprocity, offering a sustainable model of economic resilience rooted in ethnic identity and mutual aid. The findings illustrate how cultural rootedness, faith-based ethics, and informal knowledge networks can counter structural exclusion without reliance on formal institutions or external aid. The case contributes to broader debates on inclusive economic empowerment, post-extractive economies, and feminist development models. It suggests the importance of recognizing and supporting locally embedded solutions in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

Keywords: Feminist community economics; Grassroots empowerment; Informal economy; Indigenous women; Post-extractive livelihoods

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Rusli W. (2025). “Grassroots Empowerment and Economic Resilience: A Case Study of Depo Lestari Among Displaced Banjar Women.” Journal of Business and Management Revolution (ISSN 2435-7286), 5 (1): 7–14. DOI: 10.37357/1068/JBMR/5.1.02.

Windri Rusli
Department of International Development, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

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I am deeply indebted to the women of Depo Lestari and the broader Banjar community in Banjarmasin for their generosity, trust, and willingness to share their life stories. I extend profound gratitude to the owner of Depo Lestari and her family for opening their space and lives to this project. My heartfelt thanks go to the 62 women and their families who participated in this study. This research was made possible by the institutional support of the University of Sussex. I also thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for constructive comments that significantly improved this paper.

In the rapidly evolving digital payment ecosystem, optimizing merchant incentives has become a strategic necessity for increasing transaction volume, improving platform loyalty, and fostering sustainable customer engagement. Traditional incentive schemes often rely on heuristic or fixed-rate models that fail to account for the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of merchant behavior. To address these limitations, this study introduces a novel data-driven framework that employs graph-based representation learning to model and analyze complex transactional interdependencies among merchants and consumers. By capturing structural and behavioral similarities through graph neural networks (GNNs), the proposed approach enables precise prediction of each merchant’s sensitivity to diverse incentive strategies. The model integrates transaction frequency, geographical proximity, and customer overlap to generate interpretable embeddings that guide optimized budget distribution under financial constraints. Through an integrated optimization layer, incentives are allocated based on predicted responsiveness, ensuring that marketing expenditures are directed toward high-impact segments. Real-world experiments conducted on large-scale digital payment datasets validate the framework’s effectiveness, demonstrating substantial improvements in merchant participation rates, transaction growth, and cost efficiency compared to baseline regression and deep learning models. The findings highlight the potential of combining machine learning, network science, and marketing analytics to design more adaptive and data-intelligent promotional systems, thereby paving the way for scalable and targeted incentive management in next-generation digital financial platforms.

Keywords: Graph Neural Networks, Dynamic Pricing, Merchant Incentives, Digital Payments, Representation Learning

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Ajmal H. (2025). “Data-Driven Strategy for Merchant Incentive Optimization in Digital Payment Ecosystems.” Journal of Business and Management Revolution (ISSN 2435-7286), 5 (1): 1–6. DOI: 10.37357/1068/JBMR.5.1.01.

Hira Ajmal
Lahore School of Economics, Lahore, Pakistan

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The author declares no specific funding for this publication.

Green-supply chain management practices improve organizational performance from a financial and non-financial perspective. This study aims to evaluate the impact of green supply chain strategies on organizational performance. High involvement of waste reduces the efficiency of the supply chain process, which ultimately creates an adverse impact on the performance of an organization. The lack of waste reduction strategies affects the environment in terms of pollution and over-consumption of energy. This study is descriptive, and the SLR (Systematic literature review) approach is used to evaluate the impact of green practices on organizational performance. The green supply chain practices reduce the company's cost because green strategies eliminate valueless elements for customers and increase the price. The research contributes to the field of academics and business as well. From a theoretical point of view, the desired study extends the literature for future scholars. From a business perspective, the selected research suggests strategies to reduce supply chain waste. Secondary research is used to collect the data, and results will be generated after evaluating peer-reviewed articles from authentic journals. It is concluded that green practices are the need of the present business era because businesses have to reduce waste and contribute to environmental protection to get a competitive advantage.

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Hameedullah Zaheb 
Department of Energy Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kabul University, Kabul, Afghanistan

Hedayatullah Karimy 
Department of Energy Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kabul University, Kabul, Afghanistan

Najib Rahman Sabory 
Department of Energy Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kabul University, Kabul, Afghanistan

Mir Sayed Shah Danish 
Department of Energy Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kabul University, Kabul, Afghanistan

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The author(s) has received no specific funding for this article/publication.

This study interrogates the role of volunteers in society empowerment to enable students with a broad view of volunteerism as a first action. This study aims to encourage volunteer research, education, and social activities at the undergraduate and graduate students' levels. At first sight, significant workforce needs exist in educational research and studies, while only a small percentage of students volunteer their services. Consequently, many students miss the opportunity to give back to the community and excel in their academic and career assets in the long run. The analysis exposed that students are the first beneficially in unique ways if they volunteer in research and education. It is also observed that research immensely impacts learning, and knowledge positively influences society. Therefore, by implication, volunteer activities in research and education will benefit young volunteers and communities. Besides, volunteer opportunities are readily available to students. Also, conducting volunteer activities has been impactful on the overall performance rating. A volunteer should train and learn best practices and behavior. It will promote educational research, student success and improve livelihood in the community. In conclusion, this study reveals that volunteering in the field of education and research is critically important for students to participate in volunteer activities.

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Mir Sayed Shah Danish 
Strategic Research Project Center, University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa 903-0213, Japan

Tomonobu Senjyu 
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa 903-0213, Japan

Seyedeh Maryam Tayarani 
Department of Academic Affairs, Research and Education Promotion Association (REPA), Okinawa 900-0015, Japan

Michell Ann Julieth Marasigan 
Liaison Office, Research and Education Promotion Association (REPA), Okinawa 900-0015, Japan

Hameedullah Zaheb 
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa 903-0213, Japan

Alexandra Gebarowska 
Department of Academic Affairs, Research and Education Promotion Association (REPA), Okinawa 900-0015, Japan

Maria Luisa Grilli 
Department of Energy Technologies and Renewable Sources, Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA), Casaccia Research Centre, 00123 Rome, Italy

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The author(s) has received no specific funding for this article/publication.

Having been a war zone for the last four decades, Afghanistan is one of the developing countries where affordable access to quality education is still a dream for many of its people. According to the 2017 UNICEF Annual Report, over 40% (3.7 million) of school-age children were out of school in Afghanistan. In order to better design projects and programs that are working towards reducing this number, it is necessary first to understand the root causes of the issue. The objective of this research is to assess and analyze some of the various social and economic barriers that keep children out of school in Kabul City and hence, offer additional key information and recommendations for limiting this critical issue. Primary data of 300 children were collected through a survey conducted randomly in Kabul City. The target population of this survey were working children (between the ages of 5 and 18) and parents from households of different ethnic, linguistic, and regional backgrounds. Poverty and cultural limitations were found to be the most common factors preventing Afghan children from going to school. Other factors like access, physical disability, guardian’s type and education level, lack of infrastructure, child labor, and gender discrimination may also contribute to this issue. Results of the analysis suggest that government agencies can play a significant role in facilitating affordable access to quality education for all children by extending coverage of public schools, offering reasonable financial grants for poor families in order to avoid the need for child labor, and bringing necessary legal reforms in the traditional norms to discourage child marriage and gender discrimination.

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Abdul Baseer Khan 
Department of Business, Faculty of Business Administration, American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), Kabul, Afghanistan

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The author(s) has received no specific funding for this article/publication.

Reducing poverty is a critical topic of policy discussion across the world. Developing countries and post-conflict environments commonly face poverty growth. At present, Afghanistan is experiencing the highest rate of poverty in the world; only one tenth of the Afghan population has access to financial services that are mostly localized within the capital and regional cities. In this paper I hypothesize financial inclusion as a contextualized model that can significantly reduce the rate of poverty. I use a set of timeseries data on financial inclusion determinants excluding insurance as the explanatory variables and linearly regress them on the rate of poverty from 2004 to 2018. The statistical results reveal that ATMs per 100,000 adults in the country significantly reduce poverty by 0.25% by increasing capital mobility and remittances. Credit cards and borrowing facilities to the informal economy have significant coefficients of 0.00635% and 0.0207% respectively on poverty reduction as an emergent strategy. The security variable has a significant coefficient of 41% reduction of poverty. Among all other variables tested, extending mobile money facilities is also significant and reduces poverty by 0.015%.

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Mohammad Naim Azimi 
Department of Statistics and Econometrics, Faculty of Economics, Kabul University, Kabul, Afghanistan

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The author(s) has received no specific funding for this article/publication.