Entrepreneurship Education in Higher Institutes of Learning in South Africa: Challenges and Opportunities

Background/purpose. The paper explores entrepreneurship education opportunities and challenges in South Africa universities. South Africa’s historical legacy of inequality, poverty, and unemployment forced authorities to introduce entrepreneurship curricula in universities to inculcate entrepreneurial skills regardless of racial background to solve social problems. However, numerous challenges surround the successes of entrepreneurial education in higher institutions.

Materials/methods. The study is grounded in the Change Points approach to explore entrepreneurial education opportunities and challenges in South African universities. Entrepreneurship education literature review where search strings generated 1,395 hits. After screening, 1,340 articles were excluded, and 55 articles were selected for review and included in the write-up.

Results. Challenges identified range from shallow curricula that contradict market demands to leadership incompetence in delivering curriculum content, mismanagement, and embezzlement, resulting in a lack of funds to provide practical entrepreneurship skills. Historically disadvantaged universities' environments are also not conducive to entrepreneurial learning. We argue that despite massive investment in resources, staff, and infrastructure, the entrepreneurship education outcomes are unfavourable; entrepreneur graduates are ‘half-baked’, lack innovative and creative skills, undertake ‘copycat’ businesses, and become job seekers rather than job creators. They contribute to existing unemployment, inequality, and poverty. The paper therefore recommends curricula redesign to produce the skills needed in the labour industry. Higher institutions' management should provide leadership skills to lecturers, financial management and auditing should be strengthened, and industries and universities should collaborate to ‘produce’ quality entrepreneurs.

Conclusion. The paper believes that implementing such measures can help reduce the current 34.7 percent unemployment rate.

Keywords: Higher education, Entrepreneurship, Unemployment rate, Inequality, Poverty

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