The determinants of participation in entrepreneurship among students in Makerere University: Case Study of College of Business and Management Sciences and College of Engineering, Design and Technology

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is a significant transformation towards a sustainable future. The main objective of this study was to analyze the factors that affect the university students’ participation in entrepreneurship or start up business/career, a case study of Makerere university. A cross-sectional survey was adopted and primary data was collected from 400 Makerere University students of COBAMS and CEDAT. The students were selected from various schools like SSP, SOE and SOB under COBAMS then SOBE, SOEn and school of industrial Art under CEDAT using a questionnaire approach designed in a kobo collect tool box. Simple random sampling was used. Data cleaning and analysis was done using STATA. Binary logistic regression was used to analyze the determinants of entrepreneurial participation of students at Makerere University.

The study findings revealed that majority 59.27% of the respondents were female compared to the 40.73 respondents that were male, there were 58.05% of the respondents aged between 19-25 years, 32.68% of the respondents were aged above 25 years whereas 9.27% were aged below 19 years and that most respondents belonged to the college of COBAMS with 50.5% and the rest that is 49.5% from the college of CEDAT.

The study revealed that the main reason for venturing into entrepreneurship entities was money evidenced from the 73.92% of the respondents as compared to the 26.08% that had other reasons for engaging in business. Most of the respondents had mentors shown by the 54.59% whereas the other 45.41% did not have any mentor. The study findings have indicated that Age of the respondent, course/field of study and mentorship have a significant effect on entrepreneurship participation. However, all the other factors such as gender, experience, mentorship relation and main reason(money) had no significant relationship with participation in entrepreneurship.

The main recommendation from this study is to the government to provide a conducive environment for small businesses to grow through subsidizing the cost of production which in turn will reduce the cost of starting a business better yet, maintaining one. Another recommendation goes to the students, they should learn to balance both their education and business otherwise they risk losing out on both a good education and the business