Need for entrepreneurship education

1. Questions;
1a) Justify the need for entrepreneurship education in Uganda
b) Visit any successfully entrepreneurship in your area and find out;
i) Benefits from his/her business
ii) Challenges faced when starting the business
iii) The ways how he/she solved the above challenges
a)
Entrepreneurship is defined as the process of designing, launching and running a new
business, which typically begins as a small business, such as a startup company, offering a
product, process or service for sale or hire.
Entrepreneurship education seeks to provide students with the knowledge, skills and
motivation to encourage entrepreneurial success in a variety of settings. Variations of
entrepreneurship education are offered at all levels of schooling from primary or secondary
schools through graduate university programs.
Entrepreneurship education in Uganda has got the following principle benefits;
Entrepreneurship educations enlighten the prospective entrepreneur on the challenges of
obtaining capital for business start-ups. Hence, students and potential entrepreneurs are
helped capital options for small/medium scale business start-up.
Entrepreneurship education in an important component to produce or creative and innovative
society as desired under the Innovation Human Capital Development plan. In addition
entrepreneurship education programme is significant in helping to ensure graduate employ-
ability among the graduates of institutions of higher learning.
Furthermore, entrepreneurship education inculcate and expose students and potential
entrepreneurs to entrepreneurial values and skills, which include aspects of leadership,
innovation, creativity, resilience, competitiveness independence, calculated risk and the
ability to identify and create opportunities

2. Entrepreneurship education is aimed at producing graduated from institutions of higher
education with thinking and entrepreneurial attributes; increasing the number of
entrepreneurs among graduated involved in business as a catalyst for the achievement of
economic transformation of the country from a middle to a high income economy and at the
same time produce academics with values, skills, thoughts and entrepreneurship attributes.
Entrepreneurship creates job opportunities; When an entrepreneur starts a business using
his financial assets, he must need some time to share his work load. For this purpose, he hires
people to work with him. As the time passes, the entrepreneur gets satisfied that he is
investing his money in the right place. So he starts a huge business, hence creating more job
opportunities for people.
Entrepreneurship education cause economic growth; By studying entrepreneurship,
making people gain skills for creating job opportunities for people, an entrepreneur provides
wealth to the people. They tend to start a new business with innovation like providing the
best quality product within low price so that people can save their money and get the best
product. This strengthens the economy of a country. For this purpose Government also
welcomes entrepreneurs to start their business.
Entrepreneurship provides strength to small business; Most of the time, entrepreneurs
prefer to invest their money in small businesses. Such activities of the entrepreneurs provide
strength to the small business. So the niche markets flourish providing strength to the
economy of the country.
Entrepreneurship Education focuses on developing understanding and capacity for pursuit, of
entrepreneurial behaviours, skills and attributes in widely different contexts. It can be
portrayed as open to all and not exclusively the domain of the high-flying growth-seeking
business person. The propensity to behave entrepreneurially is not exclusive to certain
individuals. Different individuals will have a different mix of capabilities for demonstrating
and acquiring entrepreneurial behaviours, skills and attributes. These behaviours can be
practiced, developed and learned; hence it is important to expose all students to
entrepreneurship education
Entrepreneurial education provide benefits to society, even beyond their application to
business activity. Obviously speaking, personal qualities that are relevant to entrepreneurship,
such as creativity and a spirit of initiative, can be useful to everyone, in their working
responsibilities and in their daily existence. Also the relevant technical and business skills

3. need to be provided to those who choose to be self-employed and/or to start their own venture
– or might do so in the future
Entrepreneurship education seek to prepare youth of all ages to contribute to the efforts to
create sustainable communities. Youth can be engaged in entrepreneurship in and out of
school, at places of worship, in tribal, urban and rural communities or during summer camp.
Entrepreneurship education offer a plethora of benefits, including financial education, role
models and the necessary tools to successfully operate a business. These programs also offer
youth an opportunity to take risks, manage the results and learn from the outcomes while also
motivating youth to be productive and engaged in their communities.
Entrepreneurship education prepare youth to develop businesses and economies and be
responsible individuals by acquiring critical goal setting, time management, leadership and
interpersonal skills. Communities benefit from entrepreneurship education because youth
entrepreneurs create jobs, provide needed goods and services to the community and lead
efforts to revitalize the community.
b)
God’s grace bureau is small scale business locate in Mengo along Balintuma road. The
business is a sole proprietorship owned by Ms. Bukirwa Shadia since 2012. The business
deals in sales of stationery and provides secretarial services of printing, typesetting, bindings,
ink refilling, photocopying as well as designing,
b)
The following are the benefits Ms. Bukirwa Shadia has managed to obtain from GODs
Grace Bureau
Income; Ms. Shadiah has managed to acquire enough money from her business and now she
has even expanded it by starting a sister branch at ST Lawrence university Campus in
Kayanja Zone.
Management skills; with a 4 years experience, she believes that she has now gained al lot of
experience in business and employee management.

4. Connections; she has management to get connections with suppliers and former clients in the
banking and education sector and this has widened her market share from the refarrals.
Knowledge; she has also managed to go and upgrade her academic level as she paid for her
tuition from the business profits for a degree program at Ndejje university thus acquiring
more knowledge.
Land and a house; during the month of June this year, Bukirwa Shadia bout a piece of land
with a house and now she is no longer paying house rent for accommodation.
Employment; being a graduate with just a diploma, it was very had for Shadiah to get a job.
However with the start of her own business, she became self-employed and at the same time
she is employing other people
The following are the key challenges Ms. Shadia as an entrepreneur faced when
starting;
Electricity; one of the major problems Ms. Shadia face is the non availability of a constant
supply of light which has caused increase in costs and loss of customers. Lack of electricity
has been one of the major reasons why some times she come to work but does not make any
money.
Registration and licenses; these fees have always been her challenge in that the 270,000/=
shilling charged by KCCA trading licence is quite high and at times she cannot afford it
hence operatives sometimes close and put a seal. In addition, she has to register with Uganda
revenue authority.
Inflation and un stable prices; The stationery and secretarial service business is highly
fragile and rely on elastic demand, at times she goes for shoping when the prices for papers
and other stationers has increased yet the customers do not want to increase in the payements
for the services.
Lack of customers; during her first months, her business was constriained by the lack of
customers as she recalls that in the first three months she would not even make money for
transport and lunch hence she had to rely on her husbands’ income yet he had given her the
capital to become self-reliant

5. Costly equipment; during the initiation stage, Ms. Shadiah struggled with the high costs of
equipment for example she recalls that the photo copier she has was bought at five millions,
the printers range between 500,000 to 1 million and the hot foil machine for embroidery hard
cover cost six million Uganda shillings.
Competition; the business has always been constrained by the high competition in the
market where by some service providers charge as low as 50/= per page printing yet this is
far lower than the operating costs.
Inadequate facilities; during the start of her business, she lacked some of the printing
equipment hence this gave her competitors an edge over her business. She started with only a
printer, a desktop computer
Way for overcoming the problems
Quality services; Ms. Shadia persisted and strived to provide quality services this enabled
her to capture a reasonable market share.
Good customer relationship management; with the good customer care, customers have
increased and even when there is no electricity they can wait and come back when the power
is back.
Financial aid and soft loan; she managed to handle the financial constraints in the beginning
by acquiring a loan from her husband and sister which enabled her to pay the rent in the first
months when she was not making profits.
Advertisement; she managed to handle the challenge of strict competition by using a word
of mouth competition and also she printed posters which she distributed around Mengo and
the universities to attract and persuade customers.
Seminars and workshops; Ms. Shadia attended designing short course from Nasser institute
of Graphics and entrepreneurship seminars and training hence she acquired more skills from
the experienced individual. With this the example she gave was the popular Pakasa workshop
organised at Freedom City.

6. In conclusion, entrepreneurship is a basic important measure for boosting economic
growth of Uganda. Thus this is the possible way to fight unemployment reduce the
problem of poverty in Uganda.
References
Akpomi, M.E. (2008). Developing Entrepreneurship Education Programme (EEP) for Higher
Education Institutions (HEIs) in Nigeria. Post-doctoral research project carried out at the
University of Reading, Reading UK.
Curran, J & Stanworth, J. (1989). Education and training for enterprise – some problems of
classification, education and policy research. International Small Business Journal., Vol 7 (2)