QUALITY EDUCATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP PROGRAMME

Abstract

Quality education has always been a source of concern to the stakeholders especially, employers of labour. Owing to this development, interests in entrepreneurship education has also been rising in Nigeria as a measure of ensuring quality education. One of the compelling driving forces behind these interests and concern is perhaps the growing body of research on the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth. This actually point to, and reinforce, the critical contribution of job creation, innovation, productivity and economic growth in an emerging economy like that of Nigeria. A number of factors have been identified in the research literature as being associated with the level of entrepreneurial activity in developing and developed countries, acting as either promoters or inhibitors. In my view as an Educational planner, such multi-faceted and varied influencers include social and cultural factors; attitudinal factors; taxation and ease of business entry and exit factors; population, immigration and GDP growth factors; labour market and regulatory factors; the relative size of the public to the private sector; the density of small firms/business owners in the population; and the prevalence of entrepreneur role-models, just to mention a few. The studies in entrepreneurial education and their findings provide a great deal of important input to our understanding of the factors influencing entrepreneurial behaviour in the Nigerian society. One may conclude that in making entrepreneurship education policy, context certainly matters. One may also conclude that it is difficult to find simple correlations between the level of entrepreneurial activity and, for example, economic growth. So how are policymakers to cope with sorting through this vast array of factors believed to influence the emergence of entrepreneurship? No one field of research by itself has the capacity to produce the definitive answer to such questions as: what can be done to improve the quality of education so as to increase the level of entrepreneurial activity within an economy or what is the precise role of government in that process? This brief keynote will hopefully address these and similar questions.