Abstract:
This paper examines the influence of entrepreneurship education on technical graduates’
business start-up intentions. Specifically, it assesses the antecedents of business start-up
intentions and how entrepreneurship education moderates the effect of attitudes towards
business start-ups, societal-subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control on business
start-up intentions. Data for this study were collected from 391 technical graduates who
graduated between 2012 and 2017 from technical colleges and universities who lived in Dar
es Salaam during data collection. The collected data were analysed using descriptive
statistics and Partial Least Squares Path Modelling (PLS-PM). The findings indicate that
perceived behavioural control (52.1%) was the strongest predictor of business start-up
intentions, followed by attitude towards business start-up (28.9%), and societal-subjective
norms (11.5%). Moreover, entrepreneurship education moderated the effect of attitudes
towards business start-ups and perceived behaviour on business start-up intentions but not
subjective norms. Only 30.2% of technical graduates’ intentions translated into actual
business start-ups. Limited start-up funds, perceived high taxes, unfriendly regulatory
frameworks, and little awareness of business support services constrained the potential of
graduates’ intentions to translate into actual business start-ups. Alongside government
efforts to improve the business start-up ecosystem, technical colleges and universities should
align entrepreneurship courses with experiential pedagogies to enhance the attitudes of
students towards business start-ups and perceived behavioural control as critical
antecedents for business start-ups upon graduation.
