Entrepreneurship education in developing countries: evaluation of the start and improve your business program in Botswana

Start and Improve Your Business (SIYB) is a global entrepreneurial training program created, sponsored, and disseminated by the International Labour Organization. SIYB is arguably the world's largest skills enhancement program for entrepreneurs. SIYB has been in operation since the early 1970s and currently operates in almost 80 countries. In the decade to 2002, more than 100,000 entrepreneurs, thousands of trainers and hundreds of small-enterprise development organizations around the world have participated in the program (Samuelsen 2003). Surprisingly for an education program of this magnitude and potential global importance, there has been relatively little program evaluation performed. What evaluation has been conducted has been unsystematic, nonquantitative and unsatisfactory. Meanwhile, in the nation of Botswana, since the mid seventies, there has been a huge growth in programs devoted to the training of small and medium entrepreneurs. The SIYB program has formed a significant component of this entrepreneurial training effort in Botswana (SIYB 1996). Since its introduction in 1983, the SIYB program has only been evaluated once (Samuelson 1993). The methods used failed to provide a satisfactory evaluation of the program. So, in Botswana, the world's largest entrepreneurial training program continues to run in the absence of any knowledge concerning its efficacy. Furthermore, the program's curriculum does not include vital components of entrepreneurship, namely: opportunity evaluation, self-efficacy, innovation, and competitiveness. The objective of this study i.e. the study for this dissertation was to fill this gap in our knowledge; and this was achieved by investigating the impact of the Start and Improve Your Business (SIYB) training programme in Botswana. To meet the objectives of this dissertation, two fundamental questions were addressed: 1) What constitutes an appropriate theory of entrepreneurship education relevant to the context of developing (as distinct from developed) countries? 2) How efficacious (in both theory and practice) is education provided by the largest and most widespread entrepreneurship education program currently running in developing countries? Following these, other specific questions were addressed, such as: 3) Can I posit an 'ideal curriculum model' (ICM) for entrepreneurship education in the developing context? 4) What is the best way of evaluating the efficacy of an entrepreneurship education program? 5) Can I fit the core elements of entrepreneurial education (in an ICM) into a broader model of entrepreneurial process suitable for evaluation of a representative entrepreneurial education program current in many developing countries? An extensive entrepreneurship literature review culminated in the development of an 'ideal curriculum model' (ICM) for positing the generic attributes of a contextually relevant entrepreneurship education. This led to the development of an assessable entrepreneurship process and performance (EPP) model embracing the ICM elements in and other relevant performance variables. Further, a program evaluation of the (SIYB) was undertaken by conducting a formal empirical quantitative program evaluation study on business people who participated in the SIYB training program in Botswana and those who did not. The study consisted of a total of 197 participants (86 program participants and 111 non-participants) who completed questionnaires related to attitudes, support systems, curriculum goals, key entrepreneurship variables, and business performance. Group comparisons were conducted using MANOVAs. The efficacy of the integrated model was tested by determining patterns of correlation to test some specific hypotheses. The dominant specific aim of the study was to establish if there was a relationship between participation in SIYB training program and business performance. At the broadest but most critical level of assessment, the study revealed that there were no significant differences on a composite measure of business performance between people who had done the SIYB training and people who had not. Pearson r correlations indicated that business performance was not correlated with any of the variables in the model. This lack of any significant correlation suggests that none of the variables measured in this study significantly influences or predicts the measure of business performance in Botswana. A series of independent groups MANOVAs found some overall significant differences between SIYB program participants and other groups. Follow-up tests were conducted to examine the nature of the differences between groups. More specifically, planned contrasts were conducted on these variables (problem-solving and opportunity evaluation) for the SIYB training group and the non-SIYB control group. The results of planned contrasts revealed that, as originally indicated, participants who had not done training reported significantly lower levels of opportunity evaluation skills than those who had done the training. The results also indicated that people who had done the SIYB training exhibited more problem-solving skills than those who did not do training. However, there was no evidence to link these differences to the training itself. SIYB participants may have possessed these skills before joining the program. The study has both theoretical and practical implications. On the theoretical side, the study proposed 'an ideal curriculum model' (ICM) for entrepreneurship education and produced a testable model of entrepreneurial performance, placing educational variables in the context of non-educational variables. Since no similar or comparable models were found in the literature, these models contribute significantly to theory. The conceptual model - which was developed and empirically tested - emphasizes the role of key educational variables from the ICM. It appears robust and insightful in identifying the drivers of entrepreneurial and business performance. This insight provides opportunities for future researchers to replicate, extend, and modify the model to suit their specific research contexts and circumstances. On the practical side, education policy makers simply cannot ignore my core finding. There is scarcely any support for any efficacy of any part of the SIYB education program. So, overall, given the very small, largely insignificant differences between SIYB participants and other groups, the results demonstrate that SIYB is an ineffective program in Botswana, and thus it is likely that the program is of limited appropriateness or relevance anywhere in the developing world. The findings from the study reported in this thesis highlight the danger of assuming that training approaches for entrepreneurship in developing countries need merely make minor adjustments to what is currently provided in the developed world. The program as it exists should cease operations and be replaced by a program that embodies many of the findings discovered in this research.