The programming committee for the 78th Annual SAM International Business Conference is pleased to announce the acceptance of the presentation Entrepreneurship Education as a Tool for Poverty Alleviation in Sub-Saharan Africa by John Okpara and Jet Mboga from Bloomsburg University.
Presentation Abstract: One of the major challenges facing developing countries today is poverty. Poverty is considered to be among the most global challenges facing the world. Poverty reduction represents an important challenge for scholars and policymakers everywhere. Researchers, policymakers, and practitioners have argued that entrepreneurship is an important means for alleviating extreme poverty and research on this topic are growing. There has been a growing interested among management and administrative science scholars in entrepreneurship as a tool to reduce poverty in the last decade or more around the world. Entrepreneurial activity leads to poverty alleviation and to economic growth. Scholars have argued that entrepreneurial activity leads to poverty alleviation and to economic growth (Hirschman, 1949; Trailer, & Hill, 1996).
An understanding of the impact of entrepreneurship on poverty alleviation is crucial, and offers the potential to improve productivity and profitability for businesses. It also offers a means for moving substantial numbers of people out of poverty. Though there has been much research to date on this topic, however, very little research has been conducted on entrepreneurship education poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Nigeria. The paper investigated entrepreneurship education as a tool for the promotion of entrepreneurship among university students for poverty reduction in Nigeria. The paper adopted quantitative research design and the data was collected using a self-administered questionnaire. The respondents were selected using a simple random sampling method where a sample size of 110 was selected from a business directory.
The paper employed descriptive statistics, Chi-square tests and independent t-test as the data analysis methods. The results revealed that entrepreneurship education plays a pivotal role in promoting entrepreneurial competencies, entrepreneurship culture and promoting self-reliance and self-independence among university students in order to reduce poverty rate in South Africa. Recommendations to reduce poverty rate in Nigeria using entrepreneurship education were suggested to government agencies, institutions of higher learning, policymakers and private businesses.
Join us online or in person at SAMIBC 2023 and see this great presentation and many more March 13 – March 18, 2023. For registration information visit www.samnational.org/conference.