ABSTRACT
The success of small and medium-sized enterprises and the growth of a culture of entrepreneurship are seen as key factors in the growth strategies of many emerging economies. This has been achieved through mandating that entrepreneurship education be in the national education system. While the approach to which stages of education this applies varies from country to country, our focus here will be on tertiary education.
The rationale for policy-driven entrepreneurship education is often premised on the need to inculcate the core skills, attributes, and behaviours expected of entrepreneurs, such that they become second nature to new graduates entering the marketplace. In the United Kingdom and parts of Europe, enterprise and entrepreneurship education are differentiated, the former being skills development, often linked to employability, and the latter being about new venture creation. However, not everyone exposed to entrepreneurship training will go on to start a new venture. Nevertheless, the mindset that comes with enterprise and entrepreneurship education aims to increase graduates’ understanding of the need to innovate; it provides a greater understanding of risk taking and greater resilience to overcome challenges. Both aim to move individuals from intention to action by enhancing their ability to spot, assess, and operationalise opportunities, with the overriding aim being to enhance general economic standing and properties. Graduate unemployment is a major challenge in many emerging economies and by encouraging graduates to create jobs as well as seek them it aims to address this issue as well. Because it is common practice in many emerging economies to conflate enterprise and entrepreneurship education under the banner of the latter, we will do so in this chapter.
By inculcating entrepreneurship into the national psyche through education, the goal is to redress economic decline by enhancing entrepreneurial capacity. For many Western economies, entrepreneurship education has been encouraged for many years, but has remained a matter of choice. However, policy-driven entrepreneurship education provides a mechanism for those later to the concept, such as China, to catch up and even surpass other economies less keen to drive the mandate centrally.
However, our experience of policy-driven entrepreneurship education suggests that the rhetoric and the reality are not always harmonious. Two of the main challenges are the quality of the provision of entrepreneurship education as mandated and the support for staff to upskill to deliver the mandated policy. In this chapter, we will explore the various rationales that underpin a policy-driven approach, the initiatives that support and enable it, and the outcomes. We will draw upon the extant literature on approaches to entrepreneurship education in a range of emerging economies and then focus specifically on Nigeria using data captured by one of the authors. As space is limited within this chapter, we will present only the qualitative data gathered that best support the wider research, followed by a conclusion and recommendations for the way forward.
