Entrepreneurship Education and the Educational System in Developing Nations: Emerging Issues, Challenges and the Way Forward

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is a worldwide phenomenon with economic growth across the globe positively impacted by the emergence of new and innovative business start-ups. Small businesses play a significant role in job creation, influencing politicians to recognize and support entrepreneurial start-up activity due to its positive contribution to the economy. Reviewed literature highlighted a number of problems associated with entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education in many nations' world over and particular the developing countries such as Nigeria. This paper reviews the concept of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education and its implication on education in general and the Nigerian educational system in particular. The major problem relates too much emphasis on bookish knowledge but not on skills and competence; much emphasis on teacher centred methods but not encouraging individual/group learning methods such as project methods, focus group discussion, peer exchange, guess speakers, individual counselling, workshops etc. Other problems facing entrepreneurship education programme particularly in developing nations include inadequacy of qualified and competent teachers to effectively teach and evaluate the programme. The paper recommends among other things that entrepreneurship education should be made compulsory at all levels of educational system so that students at all levels will be encouraged to cultivate the entrepreneurial culture from earlier stage of their life. However, there is the need for empirical research in the area of entrepreneurship education in developing countries particularly in terms of proper methods, design and structure of the programme for effective implementation.