An analysis of the trends and issues in entrepreneurship education

Abstract

Entrepreneurship education has become popular in the recent times and seems to be gaining more currency in the current world. Indeed there has been a lot of effort towards popularizing entrepreneurship education as a means of creating entrepreneurial culture in order to improve economic performance and attain the goal of vision 2030. Kenya faces a challenge of poverty and acute youth unemployment. Why has entrepreneurship gained currency in the current world? The assertion that entrepreneurs are born is dispelled by the fact that even those with business acumen and propensity to take risks are sharpened or whetted by education. It is now not a debate that Entrepreneurship is taught and learned and that they also ‘become’ through their life experiences. Entrepreneurship education is said to be a lifelong learning process which starts from elementary through graduate programmes and even to working life. Entrepreneurship education is also expected to be focused on skills rather than knowledge. It has two parts; awareness part and the skills development part. It is also believed that anybody can be an entrepreneur at any point in their life. The main challenge to entrepreneurship education is the method of teaching, that is, pedagogy that is using traditional teaching approaches which are non-entrepreneurial. The other is the curriculum which the learning institutions are still grappling with. This paper examines the trends in entrepreneurship education worldwide and narrows down to Kenya in particular through analyzing documents. It collates various feelings of various authors and scholars and proposes its relevance to the entrepreneurship environment and creation of entrepreneurial culture. The paper concludes that entrepreneurship is key to development and economic performance and entrepreneurship education should be able to improve creativity, innovation, opportunity recognition and exploitation and new venture creation.