A Nation Is Doomed Without Entrepreneurship ilorin.info/fullnews.php?id=10798 Dr Muritala Awodun, is the Dean, School of Business and Governance, Kwara State University and immediate past Director of the institutions Centre for Entrepreneurship. In this interview with Sunday Trust, Awodu reiterates the import of entrepreneurship to national development and the efforts of the university to inculcate the entrepreneurship spirit into its students The Kwara State Universitys Centre for Entrepreneurship just won the Teach a Man to Fish Entrepreneurship award. What does it promise for the Centre and the university? The Centre for Entrepreneurship was acknowledged by the United Kingdom organisation, Teach a Man to Fish as the best centre for entrepreneurship in Nigeria through the award of the Pan African Entrepreneurship Education award for 2013. The organisation that gave the award has been in existence for about 11 years. They assess entrepreneurship activities all over Africa every year. This year, there were over 250 entries and our Centre for Entrepreneurship was adjudged the best. We were given a certificate to that effect and a cash prize of $1000. The award is jointly organised by the Saville Foundation in the United Kingdom and the Teach a Man to Fish organisation. We regard the award as an acknowledgement of all the efforts that we have put in place in running the Centre in the past four years or thereabout and a confirmation of the fact that we are actually blazing the trail in entrepreneurship education in Nigeria. So what basically are the ideas that you have put in place that distinguishes the Centre from others? Fundamentally, entrepreneurship is unique to Kwara State University. Nearly all the other universities now have their individual Centre for Entrepreneurship, but they didnt start with it. We started with it. And it was even after we had started our own Centre in 2009 that the Federal Government in 2011 directed other universities to each also establish a Centre for Entrepreneurship in their various universities. We started with entrepreneurship from the beginning because we identified the problem of unemployment and the kind of graduates that we are producing vis-a-viz the present nature of our economy. We felt that to be able to address the unemployment gap and job requirements as against what we are teaching in school, we identified 15 different gaps and created five courses of entrepreneurship to address them. Our entrepreneurship programme is built around five modules or five courses in five semesters, which every undergraduate here must pass through. Thats the unique side of it, unlike the entrepreneurship programme that the Nigeria Universities Commission asked all the other universities to do which is just a six-unit, two-semester maximum. Beyond that programme, we organise various entrepreneurship activities. We organise regularly the Global Entrepreneurship Week which is a week-long activity on entrepreneurship that gives the society the feel of what we are doing and also brings the town into the university as far as entrepreneurship is concerned. We have also identified the gap of entrepreneurship education at the secondary school level when the Federal Government introduced entrepreneurship in secondary school in 2011. To that effect, we organise a Train the Trainer programme for secondary school teachers in Kwara State because they are the ones that teach entrepreneurship at the secondary school level and need to be properly equipped to be able to do the job. We even have a follow-up programme on that. Beyond that, we also publish textbooks to address the gap of publication at that level of entrepreneurship. When the Federal Government required all the universities to start their entrepreneurship centre and most of them didnt know what to do, we had to start organising what we called the Entrepreneurship Directors Conference, which is in its third year. It brings all the Directors of Entrepreneurship of higher institutions in Nigeria together to share ideas on how to run entrepreneurship in their various institutions. We organised the maiden edition in 2012, the second one in 2013 and the third one is holding this month between June 16 and 20. It has come to stay as a Network of Directors of Centres for Entrepreneurship in Nigeria. We discovered that the chief executives of various universities and higher institutions are the major drivers in higher institutions and if they dont buy into the crusade, then the various institutions would not do well. So we organised recently the Chief Executive Entrepreneurship Education Resort in Obudu where we brought the Vice-Chancellors of Nigerian universities together to sensitize them towards understanding the concept of entrepreneurship and why they need to support it. In other words, what we have been doing is not just limited to what we do locally or what we do with our students, we have also been trying to spread the gospel of entrepreneurship within Nigeria and beyond. What practical approaches did you design especially for the students? To teach entrepreneurship to a large number of people, you have to devise a methodology that will work. For that reason, we approached our own entrepreneurship from the point of view of using what we have to get what we want. The classroom approach is one of the approaches adopted in teaching entrepreneurship, but using competition to get the best out of the various students. We initiate a lot of competitions in creativity and innovation, in entrepreneurship leadership, and in social entrepreneurship which culminates in our Global Entrepreneurship Week when we hold the various finals of those competitions fully involving the students in our practical efforts to teach them. So it is not just a theoretical thing; we get them to practise what they are being taught. There is a particular programme that requires the students during their holiday in second year to spend three months of internship at any enterprise of their choice during the long vacation. The students are encouraged to go into any enterprise of their choice to learn how things are done in that particular enterprise to acquire on-the-job skills. We dont leave it at that. At at the end of those three months, they come back into the classrooms and we form them into groups of industry clusters so that they can share their experiences and then come up with who they consider the best entrepreneur or enterprising among themselves. That also makes them learn from each other. We also bring the established entrepreneurs to the classrooms to share their experiences with the students so that they (the students) can learn from those who have passed through the routes they are about venturing into. We also involve them in what we call social entrepreneurship. The Kwara State University is an institution for community development. 400-level students are made, during entrepreneurship practice, to form themselves into a group of 10 each, identify a problem within the society and apply entrepreneurship principles to solve it. To what extent does this entrepreneurship education tackle the unemployment challenge confronting Nigeria? Every economy that is considered developed today is so classified because of the height of entrepreneurship in that economy. When we talk about a nation, it is all about people and enterprises; that is, people create enterprises and through enterprises, jobs are created, goods and services are delivered. So when you talk about development, it is all about enterprise creation. If a nation fails to create entrepreneurs who will create enterprises, that nation cannot develop. Enterprise creation, which is the cornerstone of our entrepreneurship programme, is therefore the yardstick or requirement for the development of any nation. The enterprises so created will create goods and services that would meet the needs within the society, solving numerous societal problems. The enterprises created will pay tax to government. You can see the value that enterprise creation adds to any society. Without entrepreneurs, a society is doomed. It is, therefore, essential for us as a nation to encourage as many people as possible to desire to become entrepreneurs. Fear of failure is a major problem of many potential entrepreneurs in taking off. How do you prepare the minds of budding entrepreneurs to overcome this fear? Nothing ventured, nothing gained. If you want to run away from risk, it is better not to even be born because even coming to this world has its risk. The risk element makes it even more interesting and rewarding. Every aspect of life has its elements of risk; it is just the degree of risk that varies from one to another. True, becoming an entrepreneur has its elements of risk because you want to venture into something whose outcome you are not so certain about. It would give you either a profit or a loss. That is why you need to be well informed on how to prepare and plan so that to a good extent, you would be able to estimate what the end result will look like. The risk factor is embedded in the society really because the environment in which you will be operating is not completely under your control. And if an environment is not under your control, it becomes very difficult for you to be able to determine what will happen the next moment. Another germane issue in entrepreneurship is the start-up capital. How do you address this? There is always this wrong feeling that you must have money to start a business. Money runs after ideas. It is ideas first before you start thinking about the money. There are several people with money in this country but who are lacking in ideas and all they do with their money is to consume it recklessly without putting it into any productive use. The first thing you need to do is to be creative. If you are creative, you will be able to put things together to bring value. Money will definitely come thereafter because part of what an entrepreneur does is to gather resources; financial resource is one of those resources. If you have something very viable, those who have money would be the ones running after you to put their money into it. Most people feel it is very difficult to get money to start an enterprise, but then that is when you are thinking of starting an enterprise from a very high level. You can only start with nothing. If you have an idea, you try to bring that idea into a reality by starting with what is available and within your control. You have to make some sacrifices. But this is not removing the fact that the start-up capital mechanism should not be put in place by government. We encourage government to put up micro-credit facilities to support serious entrepreneurs.
Posted on: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 09:07:17 +0000
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