entrepreneurship education program in nigeria

Nigeria’s education for entrepreneurs needs to keep it real, not just in the classroom

Researcher, Academic Developer,learning experience designer and Student Coach, University of Lagos

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Bukola Amao-Taiwo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Africa is home to over 200 million people aged between 15 and 24, according to UN data. The continent has the largest population of young people in the world.

This should be a sign of great productive potential. Unfortunately, youth unemployment and under-employment have held productivity back, resulting in a very slow pace of development in Africa.

Shortly after the “Arab Spring” , when youth movements helped to topple the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, the Africa Development Bank predicted that the lack of decent employment opportunities in Africa could undermine social cohesion and political stability.

In Nigeria, the 2020 EndSARS protest showed that youth unemployment had become an emergency needing urgent attention.

The highest unemployment rate recorded in Nigeria in 2020 was for young people between the ages of 15 and 24. In that age bracket, 40.8% (13.9 million) of young Nigerians were unemployed.

Even education isn’t a guarantee of a decent job. Unemployment among people with a doctorate degree stood at 16.9% in 2020. Many PhD graduates still roam the streets and the online space in search of decent jobs that fit into the qualification.

Over a decade before the EndSARS protest, Nigeria’s ministry of education, in partnership with the National Universities Commission , introduced an entrepreneurship skills development curriculum in Nigerian universities making it a compulsory course for University undergraduates.

Funds were provided for the establishment of entrepreneurship centres where students and lecturers could develop the capacity for an entrepreneurial mindset. These centres are also meant to serve as hubs that will provide mentorship and support for faculty and student entrepreneurs.

The goal is to support the emergence of a university ecosystem where students and lecturers create value that will attract financial returns. This will in turn give Nigerian graduates more options in their working lives – not just competing for white collar jobs.

Ten years later, the rate of graduate unemployment is still on the increase . This is beginning to expose the need to rethink the design, delivery and partnerships for implementing the Nigerian entrepreneurship education program.

My PhD research sought to contribute to this by exploring the student experience of entrepreneurship education in Lagos and Ogun states universities.

I found that participating students had a high level of entrepreneurship skills, but didn’t really want to have to use them. They did not perceive entrepreneurship as a way to achieve their goals in life, and were still hoping for white collar jobs. The solution, I believe, is for the curriculum and the teaching support to be more realistic about business – partly by drawing on actual entrepreneurs as a resource.

Where to focus for impact

I gave questionnaires to 2,394 final year students and conducted interviews with six directors of entrepreneurship development centres in Lagos and Ogun States.

One thing I wanted to understand was what aspect of entrepreneurship programmes might produce the necessary impact fastest. Student engagement, student support, teaching quality and teaching resources were the aspects I looked at. Of these, teaching quality showed the strongest potential to make an impact quickly.

The implication is that entrepreneurship education lecturers and facilitators need to know what to teach, what not to teach, and how to teach.

In a nutshell, lecturers who are entrepreneurial themselves will be better teachers of entrepreneurship. Their personal stories will make a huge difference.

The findings also provide evidence that effective entrepreneurship education programmes require collaboration.

When it comes to supporting students, only one of the universities in my study had a structured programme to help students grow the businesses they started. Other universities provided walk-in opportunities for funders and investors to support student businesses.

Structures should be put in place for student grants, competitions, seed funding, mentoring, accelerators and other opportunities that support student businesses. It’s up to university management to do this.

Support from external stakeholders would then be an extra resource rather than a pillar holding up the university’s programme.

One of the directors of the Entrepreneurship and Skills Development Centres pointed out that entrepreneurship education was not cheap to provide but government was not providing adequate teaching and learning resources. Large classes of over 600 students also made it hard to teach effectively. Students should be able to work in smaller groups and teams.

Resources to use

Government funding seems to be dwindling, as evidenced by the recent lecturers’ strike . So there might be a need to attract external stakeholders to sponsor competitions, clubs and student teams.

The learning experience of students should entail being directly in touch with the realities of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs. It should not only involve reading about, hearing about, talking about, or writing about entrepreneurship.

Facilitators of such courses should give students activities that connect them with the world of entrepreneurs.

Read more: Nigeria's universities can find funds and produce job creators: here's how

Not every aspect of the curriculum can be taught by academics. There should be linkages that provide opportunities for practising entrepreneurs to be mentors, facilitators and funders of student entrepreneurs.

Sometimes the street trader, roadside mechanic or roadside food vendor is the best person to teach students about starting a business.

Other useful models are people with many years of experience failing and succeeding as an entrepreneur.

Mapping the way forward

A sustained entrepreneurship skills development programme requires a collaborative approach in which universities, business people, successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs and students are active participants.

University managers need to provide structures that will open up the universities for collaborations with entrepreneurs and industries to provide support in terms of seed funding, infrastructure, human resources and technical expertise.

The universities should base decisions about interventions and partnerships on data about what has the most impact.

Commercialisation of university products and outputs should be encouraged. Entrepreneurial lecturers should be valued. The system should welcome a handshake between theory and practice.

• Unemployment
• Youth unemployment
• Entrepreneurship
• graduate unemployment

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African Journal of Economic and Management Studies

ISSN : 2040-0705

Article publication date: 11 June 2018

Issue publication date: 11 June 2018

Entrepreneurship education plays a crucial role in the development of entrepreneurs and the enhancement of entrepreneurial activities in every economy. This paper presents the findings of a review of Nigerian entrepreneurship education literature published in 20 journals over a 16-year period. The purpose of this paper is to examine research contributions in the field of entrepreneurship education within the Nigerian context, with the aim of understanding the focus and the different research areas covered by researchers in this area, and to make suggestions that can guide scholars in their future research contributions.

Design/methodology/approach

Systematic literature reviews are recognized methods for conducting evidence-based research. The study adopted a systematic literature review approach, drawing from a computerized search of five selected databases, using predetermined key words by the researchers.

The main finding of this paper is that related concepts like skills, intention, drive and attitude have been used in expounding discussions on the outcome of entrepreneurship education, but very little has been written on entrepreneurial mindset, which other studies have suggested is a crucial point in the journey of an entrepreneur (Reed and Stoltz, 2011; Neneh, 2012). Furthermore, learning and teaching of entrepreneurship in the Nigerian higher education institutions seem to be more focused on creating awareness about entrepreneurship, as against the experiential approach that scholars have argued to be a prerequisite for developing the next generation of entrepreneurs (Bell, 2015). The study also found that over 80 percent of the reviewed articles are published in journals not ranked or indexed in the ABS journal rankings or the Scopus database.

Research limitations/implications

The paper is limited since it is based on a review of literature from a selected range of databases, covering a specific time span. This potentially excludes other studies outside this time span. Scholarship in this area and context will benefit greatly when researchers target, choose and engage the higher ranked and more impactful journals as the outlet for their research outputs.

Practical implications

At a time when efforts are being made to address socioeconomic issues like poverty and unemployment through mainstream training in entrepreneurship education, this paper provides a better understanding of the state of research in this context, by highlighting the potential gaps as to where research investigation is needed for better policy formulation and guiding future research.

Originality/value

There are limited studies that focus on the issue of entrepreneurial mindset in entrepreneurship education in Nigeria. Overall, this paper identifies an important gap in the literature that warrants future research.

• Entrepreneurship education
• Entrepreneurial intention
• Entrepreneurial mindset
• Entrepreneurial learning and teaching

Yatu, L. , Bell, R. and Loon, M. (2018), "Entrepreneurship education research in Nigeria: current foci and future research agendas", African Journal of Economic and Management Studies , Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 165-177. https://doi.org/10.1108/AJEMS-08-2016-0120

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited

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