The Scottish University Level Entrepreneurship Education Initiative: Lessons for Ghana in Dealing with Graduate Unemployment

Abstract

The aim of the study was to investigate entrepreneurship education at the university level in Scotland and lessons Ghana could learn from their experience in solving graduate unemployment.  The main data used for the study was primary, collected through interviews with six academics involved in university level entrepreneurship education at four universities in Scotland.  Qualitative approach was used for this research so as to have a first-hand perception of academics on the entrepreneurship education at the university level. Scottish Enterprise is using entrepreneurship education at the university level as a policy strategy for increasing business birth rate among Scottish university graduates.  It clearly emerged from the perspective of academics that entrepreneurship education at the university level cannot significantly lead to business start-ups and therefore cannot be used as a strategy for self-employment among graduates.  It became therefore evident that entrepreneurship education cannot be used as a sole strategy for solving unemployment; it can though equip students with some employability skills.  The lessons that Ghana can learn from the Scottish experience is that entrepreneurship education could equip students with some enterprise skills (which are needed by employers in Ghana) that would make them employable, thereby contributing to solving graduate unemployment in Ghana.

Keywords: enterprise and entrepreneurship education, universities, unemployment, Scotland, Ghana, graduates.