Investigating the provision of entrepreneurship education and training in tertiary education and training institutions in Malawi.

Abstract

In the past five years, there has been a proliferation of entrepreneurship education and training programmes or courses in the tertiary education and training institutions in Malawi. However, little is known about the entrepreneurship education and training programmes that are available in the country. Most of the entrepreneurship programmes have focused on educating the student about entrepreneurship rather than for entrepreneurship in order to create an entrepreneur. The study was undertaken to study the landscape of entrepreneurship education and training in Malawi and offer recommendations on its improvement. The methodology used in the study involved reviewing the secondary data sources that were available before designing a survey questionnaire which was administered on twenty-one accredited tertiary education and training institutions in the country. The survey questionnaire was administered through electronic mail and personally by the researcher. In this regard, the census method was used in coming up with the sample for the study. A total of sixteen institutions out of the twenty-one were reached through the questionnaire generating a 76.2% response rate. The secondary data sources review indicated that 52.4% of the tertiary education and training institutions in Malawi offered entrepreneurship education and training. Of these tertiary education and training institutions, 14.3% were public universities, 23.8% were private universities and 14.3% were other institutions which were neither public universities nor private universities. However, the survey results showed that 66.7% of the tertiary education and training institution survey offered entrepreneurship education and training, and only 40% of the public universities compared to 83.3% of the private universities had an entrepreneurship offering. The other institutions which were neither public nor private universities had 50% of them offering entrepreneurship education and training. It was also established that 55.6% of the entrepreneurship education and training which was being offered was intended to either create an entrepreneur or to make the students become more entrepreneurial i.e. innovative and take responsibility about their career lives. Similarly, 55.6% of the lecturers who were involved in entrepreneurship education and training had been involved in a start-up business while 33.3% of the respondents had been a manager in a new or young business meaning that their experience in start-ups was being taking to the students to enhance learners’ experience. The main recommendations of the study include the need to introduce entrepreneurship education and training early in the Malawian education system at secondary school level or senior primary school level in order to make the students more enterprising in their lives,the need to train more entrepreneurship teachers for effective delivery of entrepreneurship education and training, the need to make entrepreneurship education and training mandatory in both public and private universities just like it is with HIV-AIDS education and the need for the tertiary education and training institutions need to coordinate and conduct annual entrepreneurship workshops, seminars, conferences and symposiums in order to share practices and increase awareness in the role of entrepreneurship education and training in the development of entrepreneurial mind-sets and attitudes. The major limitation of the study was limited resources and time constraints; hence, all institutions could not be surveyed.