Funding Business Education Programmes for Sustainable Development in the Niger Delta

Abstract

The study investigated funding business education programmes for sustainable Development in the Niger Delta.  Two research questions were posed to guide the study and one hypothesis was formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance.  The entire population of 138 was studied by the researchers and no sample/sampling was considered necessary as the study observed a purposive design.  Data for this study were collected by means of questionnaire developed by the researchers and titled “Funding of Business Education Programmes for Sustainable Development in the Niger Delta (FBEPFSDND’’.  A total of 120 lecturers who returned their instrument amounting to 89 percent return rate were studied.  The FBEPFSDND has two parts “A” and “B”.  Part A sought information on the selected personal background of the respondents, and it contained three items.  Part B sought information on the view of the lecturers regarding the topic of the study and was broken into two as each contained six question items.  The questionnaire adopted a modified four point Likert scale designed as Strongly Agreed (SA = 4 points); Agreed (A = 3 points); Disagreed (DA = 2 points) and Strongly Disagreed (SDA = 1 point).  Test-retest method was used to test the reliability of the items with face and content validity.  Validity was done by six lecturers, other than those used for the study and a reliability co-efficient of 0.89 was obtained.  Mean rating and standard deviation was used to analyse the research questions while Z-test was used to test the hypothesis.  Findings revealed that business education programmes is not effectively funded within the Niger Delta Area, also the challenges in business education programmes can be minimized through specific budgetary allocation, favourable government policies with effective funding of business education programmes, effective management of available financial and material resources and experts in headship of business education programmes.  Based on the findings, discussions were made and conclusions drawn, recommendations made amongst others were that Federal and State Government should adequately fund business education programmes to overcome some of its challenges, experts in business education should be used as headship of the programmes.  This is because non-experts as headship of business education will not understand the actual need and challenges to the programmes, TETFUND, ETF and PTDF should be made to fund the universities appropriately which in turn will help business education programmes if adequate allocation is given to the universities, and a chatter on funding business education programmes in our institutions of learning should be the focus of business educators.

Keywords: Funding, Business Education, Programmes, Sustainable, Development, Niger Delta.