Entrepreneurship Education and Employment Creation in North-West Nigeria
The Role of Skills and Perceived Relevance
Main Article Content
Abstract
This study aims to identify the perceived skills and competence acquired through entrepreneurship education and the perceived impact on employment creation, proxied by entrepreneurial intentions among graduates of tertiary institutions in the North-West region of Nigeria. This study is underpinned by the human capital theory and adopts the descriptive and cross-sectional survey approach. A survey was conducted on 700 graduates from higher institutions in the North-West region of Nigeria, selected through a convenience sampling technique. Furthermore, a well-structured questionnaire with a 5-point Likert scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree was deployed to identify the significant entrepreneurial skills and competencies developed through entrepreneurship education and participants' perceptions regarding the effectiveness of entrepreneurial skills acquired and their impact on entrepreneurial intention. Subsequently, the data collected were subjected to analysis using the Relative Importance Index (RII) to identify and rank entrepreneurial skills acquired by participants, and the ordinal regression was used to establish the impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention. Findings revealed that value creation (0.76114), opportunity assessment (0.76028), and tenacity (0.75657) are the top three entrepreneurial skills competencies perceived by graduates in Northwest Nigeria. Additionally, the regression analysis found a significant positive relationship between Skills Acquired (β = 0.445,ƿ =0.05) Relevant Training (β = 0.756,ƿ =0.01), and Entrepreneurship Intention. Collectively, skills acquired and relevant training significantly entrepreneurial intention (R2 = 0.68). Consequently, the study concludes that entrepreneurship education programmes in tertiary institutions in the North-West region of Nigeria have successfully cultivated a core set of competencies among graduates. Therefore, programme designers are advised to add experiential learning modules and strengthen industry-academia partnerships to keep training contextually relevant. This study adds to existing literature by linking specific skills and training to entrepreneurial intention and employment creation among graduates in Northwestern Nigeria.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Audu Abayomi Yusau, Abubakar Magaji (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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