Contribution of Business Education in Promoting Entrepreneurship Behaviour

Abstract

The study focused on the extent to which business education develops entrepreneurship behaviour among graduates in Tanzania. A cross-sectional research design was employed to get information from respondents whereby a questionnaire and an interview checklist were used to collect data from 88 graduates who were sampled through convenience (chunk) sampling technique. General Enterprising Tendencies Test (GET2) was used to collect data about entrepreneurial behaviour tendencies from business education graduates. Descriptive statistics such as frequencies and percentages were computed to analyse data and binary logit regression. The study found that there were very few graduates (24.1%) pursuing with self-employment career, and this might be due to low level of entrepreneurial tendencies and lack of capital. The study also found significance influence (p < 0.05) of business education skills such financial skills, marketing skills, management skills and business idea generation skills on development of entrepreneurship behaviour. The Main factors which led graduates to pursue self-reliance are need for independence and autonomy, need to accumulate more money, family background and needs to create employment opportunities. Factors which hinder graduates to pursue self-reliance are lack of capital, fear of risks, unfavourable environment for business initiation in terms of taxes and bureaucracy in registration and lack of viable business opportunities in terms of markets and price stabilities. Finally, it is concluded that business education skills contribute to a high extent to entrepreneurship behaviour among graduates, thus, more practical measures should be taken to ensure high entrepreneurial behaviour among business education graduates.