Reframing Higher Education in Africa: The Case for Demand-Driven Entrepreneurship Education

[caption id="attachment_11446" align="aligncenter" width="600"] African universities need to adjust to prepare students to become successful entrepreneurs and private sector workers. Photo by Ting Chen, via Flickr. Creative Commons.
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In its Strategic Development Planning document for 2015 to 2019, the Africa and Malagasy Council for Higher Education (CAMES), a continent-wide university accrediting organization, describes the state of higher education in Africa in the following terms: "Once upon a time, economic development was dependent on the abundance of natural resources and on the availability of cheap and less qualified labor. Nowadays, development depends on the production, on the diffusion, and on the utilization of knowledge and of new technologies. In this knowledge economy, innovation in the utilization of competent human resources, of technology and of knowledge is the key to sustainable economic growth. In that regards, higher education and research play a key role as they are able to create, promote and diffuse knowledge."

Higher education in Africa is mostly supply-driven and does not meet the current needs of Africa's economies. It does not prepare university students to create jobs and start businesses in the private sector, or indeed to effectively pursue jobs outside the public sector at all. Further, those in the informal sector who are already entrepreneurs lack access to education and training that would enable them to more effectively build their businesses.  Given the high unemployment rate, entrepreneurship education should be mainstreamed in university curricula, and the whole framework of education in Africa should be revisited, so as to move from a supply-driven to a demand-driven paradigm.

An unemployment problem

African countries face significant looming unemployment problems. The 2015 ILO report on youth employment estimates that more than 10 million youth join the job market across Africa every year. This is far more than most countries' public sectors can absorb. For comparison, the Ivorian public sector had less than 20,000 job openings for the civil year (by May 2016 estimates), while about 160,000 youth graduate from high school every year (based on 2013 figures). It is therefore no surprise that 66.7 percent of youth are either unemployed or inactive (according to the National Survey on Unemployment and Child Labor), meaning they don't have jobs but don't formally count as unemployed.

The current style of education in Africa does not train youth to be job-ready when they graduate. This is particularly true of higher education. In Côte d'Ivoire, youth that hold a tertiary education are two to three times more likely to be unemployed than youth with a primary education or less. A 2013 report from the African Development Bank shows that between 2011 and 2012, unemployment increased by 34 percent for male and 45 percent for female youth with higher education. This implies that not only does higher education not prepare youth to be job-ready, but it actually worsens their employment prospects.

The informal sector: Missing the opportunities of appropriate investment

While tertiary degrees fail to raise the job prospects of university students, those who earn a living in the informal sector are left out of formal education. 44.6 percent of the population of Côte d'Ivoire depend economically on the informal sector, but don't have the training to be more effective entrepreneurs. Effective education has the potential to build on the skills already developed by budding entrepreneurs in the informal sector to strengthen their capacity as economic actors. In Africa in general and in West Africa in particular, women mostly dominate the informal sector. For instance, the Nana Benz women in Togo, Benin, and Nigeria are job creators and deserve to be supported and included in the formal education system. Involving them in formal education would both strengthen their entrepreneurial capabilities and help them share their experience with less experienced youth.

Toward a new framework for higher education in Africa

For education to help youth face the economic and social challenges of the world, it has to be demand-driven and bottom-up. Education curricula should not only be crafted in meetings between professors and school administrators; the best way to do a thorough diagnostic of the challenges is to have all stakeholders involved. The 'triple helix' of government, the private sector, and universities should work in synergy to identify the major challenges youth face when they graduate and construct curricula accordingly. The private sector strand of the triple helix should include civil society organizations as well, ensuring that societal concerns such as the environment, gender, and human rights, and more are also taken into consideration. Education should be understood as a tool to train young people to face the challenges of today's fast-changing social and professional environment, and to allow them to create jobs, be responsive to opportunity, and succeed in the private sector as well as the public.

However, for the mainstreaming of entrepreneurship to be effective, private sector employment in general and entrepreneurship in particular need to be re-branded. In Côte d'Ivoire students interviewed in an empirical study prefer public service to the private sector for several reasons, including the high profile of public jobs (36 percent), the job security (26 percent), and because they feel they were not prepared to be in the private sector (25 percent). Only 13 percent indicated they would choose to go into the private sector because it provides economic independence. Demand-driven education would help make the private sector more attractive to students and better prepare them to work in it. Entrepreneurship could be chosen as a profession, rather than being a default option.

Francois Pazisnewende Kaboré, SJ,was a Southern Voices Network scholar at the Wilson Center from May to July 2016. He is the Director of the Jesuit University Institute at the Center for Research and Action for Peace (CERAP), a member of the Southern Voices Network.