NACETEM 2008 1

DETERMINANTS OF ENTERPRENEURIAL PROPENSITY

OF NIGERIAN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

AN INSTITUTIONAL ASSESSMENT

Afolabi O.O., Egbetokun A. A., Sanni M., Dada A. D., Jesuleye O. A. and Siyanbola W. O.

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Outline Background Methods Results and Discussion Conclusions

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Background Entrepreneurship, in the form of new firms,

benefits the economy in many ways. It is essential to creating new economic activity.

Entrepreneurial activity is especially beneficial for developing countries both at a micro level – in terms of creating stable and sustainable employment for individuals – and at a macro level – where it significantly increases a nation's GDP.

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Background Yet many developing countries have been unable to

create and maintain the favourable environment needed to foster Small, Micro and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMMEs) development

A number of barriers which entrepreneurs in developing countries face have been identified which entrepreneurship support initiatives can help address.

Bridges.org (2002) classified these barriers into four broad categories: Infrastructure, Legal and regulatory framework, Financial support and Social barriers.

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Background An entrepreneur is a person who recognises

opportunities, has ideas and uses them to create or develop a business (Gartner, 1998)

It has generally been argued that the institutions of higher learning is one of the best places to nurture these characteristics (see Wang and Wong, 2004).

For this reason, an exploration of the propensity of undergraduates for entrepreneurship would be of value for policy making.

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Study Aims This work

assesses students’ involvement and interest in entrepreneurial practice in Nigeria, and

attempts to identify the specific factors that motivate or discourage students from engaging in entrepreneurship.

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Study Variables More recently intentions models (Bird, 1988; Boyd &

Vozikis, 1994) that focus on attitudes and their antecedents have been proposed to better explain the entrepreneurship process.

Davidsson (1995) related personal variables including age, gender, education, vicarious experience and experiences of change to a variety of attitudes that influenced conviction and entrepreneurial intentions (Peterman and Kennedy, 2003).

Adegbite and Abereijo (2006) and Wang and Wong (2004) also showed that there is a relationship between family background and entrepreneurial behaviour.

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Research Methods Data was collected among penultimate and

final year undergraduates of the University of Ibadan (UI) using questionnaire.

We investigated the relationship between the explanatory variables and the entrepreneurial behaviour of students with a view to determining the explanatory power of each variable.

Correlation analysis was used to evaluate the relationship between the dependent and independent variables

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Entrepreneurial Interest of Students

91%

9%

EI

No EI

Majority of the students (90.8%) were willing to start their own business while just 9.2% did not show any interest in starting any form of business.

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Results This surpasses the figure of 65% found in a study of young

people in the United States and 68.2% in Australia (Walstad & Kourilsky, 1999).

One in every five students was also found to be One in every five students was also found to be involved in some business while still in school.involved in some business while still in school.

If Nigerian students are as interested in If Nigerian students are as interested in entrepreneurship as these figures show, one wonders entrepreneurship as these figures show, one wonders why there are so few start-ups and numerous why there are so few start-ups and numerous unemployed graduates?unemployed graduates?

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CorrelatesIndependent Variables Are you presently

engaged in any business?

Are you interested in starting your own business?

Marital status -0.122* 0.014

Father's range of monthly income -0.177* 0.001

Is the business on-going? 0.025 0.140*Any close relative of yours initiated/run a business before?

0.128 0.138*

Is the business on-going? -0.072 0.128

Have you taken any business/entrepreneurship course/programme before?

0.197** 0.122*

Rate level of concern about risk involved in starting own business

0.162** -0.086

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Summary of Correlates

Variable Number of CorrelatesEntrepreneurial involvement

4

Entrepreneurial interest 3

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Summary of Correlates Students’ present involvement in

entrepreneurship is significantly explained by their marital status, the monthly income of their father, whether or not they have taken at least one course in entrepreneurship and their level of concern about entrepreneurial risk.

In contrast, entrepreneurial interest is only explained by the incidence of a close relative who is or had been an entrepreneur and whether or not the student had taken an entrepreneurial course.

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Conclusions and Implications From the preceding discussions, we

come to the conclusion that students’ involvement in business in Nigeria is fair and their interest in entrepreneurship is high.

There is dissimilarity in the main factors that influence the present and future entrepreneurial behaviour of these students.

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Conclusions and Implications

An important policy direction that these results point towards is the potential of entrepreneurial training to stimulate students’ interest in entrepreneurship

It is clear by the emergence of personal and family-related variables as important that while entrepreneurship could be taught, the actual practice of entrepreneurship depends on a broad range of factors, with socio-economic ones being very significant.

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THANK YOU