Questions;

1a) Justify the need for entrepreneurship education in Uganda

b) Visit any successfully entrepreneurship in your area and find out;

i) Benefits from his/her business

ii) Challenges faced when starting the business

iii) The ways how he/she solved the above challenges

a)

Entrepreneurship is defined as the process of designing, launching and running a new

business, which typically begins as a small business, such as a startup company, offering a

product, process or service for sale or hire.

Entrepreneurship education seeks to provide students with the knowledge, skills and

motivation to encourage entrepreneurial success in a variety of settings. Variations of

entrepreneurship education are offered at all levels of schooling from primary or secondary

schools through graduate university programs.

Entrepreneurship education in Uganda has got the following principle benefits;

Entrepreneurship educations enlighten the prospective entrepreneur on the challenges of

obtaining capital for business start-ups. Hence, students and potential entrepreneurs are

helped capital options for small/medium scale business start-up.

Entrepreneurship education in an important component to produce or creative and innovative

society as desired under the Innovation Human Capital Development plan. In addition

entrepreneurship education programme is significant in helping to ensure graduate employ-

ability among the graduates of institutions of higher learning.

Furthermore, entrepreneurship education inculcate and expose students and potential

entrepreneurs to entrepreneurial values and skills, which include aspects of leadership,

innovation, creativity, resilience, competitiveness independence, calculated risk and the

ability to identify and create opportunities

Entrepreneurship education is aimed at producing graduated from institutions of higher

education with thinking and entrepreneurial attributes; increasing the number of

entrepreneurs among graduated involved in business as a catalyst for the achievement of

economic transformation of the country from a middle to a high income economy and at the

same time produce academics with values, skills, thoughts and entrepreneurship attributes.

Entrepreneurship creates job opportunities; When an entrepreneur starts a business using

his financial assets, he must need some time to share his work load. For this purpose, he hires

people to work with him. As the time passes, the entrepreneur gets satisfied that he is

investing his money in the right place. So he starts a huge business, hence creating more job

opportunities for people.

Entrepreneurship education cause economic growth; By studying entrepreneurship,

making people gain skills for creating job opportunities for people, an entrepreneur provides

wealth to the people. They tend to start a new business with innovation like providing the

best quality product within low price so that people can save their money and get the best

product. This strengthens the economy of a country. For this purpose Government also

welcomes entrepreneurs to start their business.

Entrepreneurship provides strength to small business; Most of the time, entrepreneurs

prefer to invest their money in small businesses. Such activities of the entrepreneurs provide

strength to the small business. So the niche markets flourish providing strength to the

economy of the country.

Entrepreneurship Education focuses on developing understanding and capacity for pursuit, of

entrepreneurial behaviours, skills and attributes in widely different contexts. It can be

portrayed as open to all and not exclusively the domain of the high-flying growth-seeking

business person. The propensity to behave entrepreneurially is not exclusive to certain

individuals. Different individuals will have a different mix of capabilities for demonstrating

and acquiring entrepreneurial behaviours, skills and attributes. These behaviours can be

practiced, developed and learned; hence it is important to expose all students to

entrepreneurship education

Entrepreneurial education provide benefits to society, even beyond their application to

business activity. Obviously speaking, personal qualities that are relevant to entrepreneurship,

such as creativity and a spirit of initiative, can be useful to everyone, in their working

responsibilities and in their daily existence. Also the relevant technical and business skills

need to be provided to those who choose to be self-employed and/or to start their own venture

– or might do so in the future

Entrepreneurship education seek to prepare youth of all ages to contribute to the efforts to

create sustainable communities. Youth can be engaged in entrepreneurship in and out of

school, at places of worship, in tribal, urban and rural communities or during summer camp.

Entrepreneurship education offer a plethora of benefits, including financial education, role

models and the necessary tools to successfully operate a business. These programs also offer

youth an opportunity to take risks, manage the results and learn from the outcomes while also

motivating youth to be productive and engaged in their communities.

Entrepreneurship education prepare youth to develop businesses and economies and be

responsible individuals by acquiring critical goal setting, time management, leadership and

interpersonal skills. Communities benefit from entrepreneurship education because youth

entrepreneurs create jobs, provide needed goods and services to the community and lead

efforts to revitalize the community.

b)

God’s grace bureau is small scale business locate in Mengo along Balintuma road. The

business is a sole proprietorship owned by Ms. Bukirwa Shadia since 2012. The business

deals in sales of stationery and provides secretarial services of printing, typesetting, bindings,

ink refilling, photocopying as well as designing,

b)

The following are the benefits Ms. Bukirwa Shadia has managed to obtain from GODs

Grace Bureau

Income; Ms. Shadiah has managed to acquire enough money from her business and now she

has even expanded it by starting a sister branch at ST Lawrence university Campus in

Kayanja Zone.

Management skills; with a 4 years experience, she believes that she has now gained al lot of

experience in business and employee management.

Connections; she has management to get connections with suppliers and former clients in the

banking and education sector and this has widened her market share from the refarrals.

Knowledge; she has also managed to go and upgrade her academic level as she paid for her

tuition from the business profits for a degree program at Ndejje university thus acquiring

more knowledge.

Land and a house; during the month of June this year, Bukirwa Shadia bout a piece of land

with a house and now she is no longer paying house rent for accommodation.

Employment; being a graduate with just a diploma, it was very had for Shadiah to get a job.

However with the start of her own business, she became self-employed and at the same time

she is employing other people

The following are the key challenges Ms. Shadia as an entrepreneur faced when

starting;

Electricity; one of the major problems Ms. Shadia face is the non availability of a constant

supply of light which has caused increase in costs and loss of customers. Lack of electricity

has been one of the major reasons why some times she come to work but does not make any

money.

Registration and licenses; these fees have always been her challenge in that the 270,000/=

shilling charged by KCCA trading licence is quite high and at times she cannot afford it

hence operatives sometimes close and put a seal. In addition, she has to register with Uganda

revenue authority.

Inflation and un stable prices; The stationery and secretarial service business is highly

fragile and rely on elastic demand, at times she goes for shoping when the prices for papers

and other stationers has increased yet the customers do not want to increase in the payements

for the services.

Lack of customers; during her first months, her business was constriained by the lack of

customers as she recalls that in the first three months she would not even make money for

transport and lunch hence she had to rely on her husbands’ income yet he had given her the

capital to become self-reliant

Costly equipment; during the initiation stage, Ms. Shadiah struggled with the high costs of

equipment for example she recalls that the photo copier she has was bought at five millions,

the printers range between 500,000 to 1 million and the hot foil machine for embroidery hard

cover cost six million Uganda shillings.

Competition; the business has always been constrained by the high competition in the

market where by some service providers charge as low as 50/= per page printing yet this is

far lower than the operating costs.

Inadequate facilities; during the start of her business, she lacked some of the printing

equipment hence this gave her competitors an edge over her business. She started with only a

printer, a desktop computer

Way for overcoming the problems

Quality services; Ms. Shadia persisted and strived to provide quality services this enabled

her to capture a reasonable market share.

Good customer relationship management; with the good customer care, customers have

increased and even when there is no electricity they can wait and come back when the power

is back.

Financial aid and soft loan; she managed to handle the financial constraints in the beginning

by acquiring a loan from her husband and sister which enabled her to pay the rent in the first

months when she was not making profits.

Advertisement; she managed to handle the challenge of strict competition by using a word

of mouth competition and also she printed posters which she distributed around Mengo and

the universities to attract and persuade customers.

Seminars and workshops; Ms. Shadia attended designing short course from Nasser institute

of Graphics and entrepreneurship seminars and training hence she acquired more skills from

the experienced individual. With this the example she gave was the popular Pakasa workshop

organised at Freedom City.

In conclusion, entrepreneurship is a basic important measure for boosting economic

growth of Uganda. Thus this is the possible way to fight unemployment reduce the

problem of poverty in Uganda.

References

Akpomi, M.E. (2008). Developing Entrepreneurship Education Programme (EEP) for Higher

Education Institutions (HEIs) in Nigeria. Post-doctoral research project carried out at the

University of Reading, Reading UK.

Curran, J & Stanworth, J. (1989). Education and training for enterprise – some problems of

classification, education and policy research. International Small Business Journal., Vol 7 (2)