Dr Shaheen Khan (Senior Academic & Programme Co-ordinator at Regent Business School)
South Africa faces one of the most acute youth unemployment challenges in the world. More than six in ten South Africans aged 15 to 24 are unemployed, according to Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the first quarter of 2026. Despite various policy interventions aimed at stimulating economic growth and employment creation, unemployment remains persistently high, particularly among young people entering the labour market. Against this backdrop, entrepreneurship has been promoted as a mechanism for economic development, innovation and job creation. As a result, entrepreneurship education has expanded considerably across universities, Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges, private higher education institutions, Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) and government-supported enterprise development initiatives.
While this growth is encouraging, an important question remains: is entrepreneurship education producing sustainable entrepreneurs, or merely producing entrepreneurship graduates?
Across South Africa, thousands of learners and students complete entrepreneurship-related programmes annually. Institutions report enrolment figures, completion rates and learner satisfaction scores. Yet far less attention is paid to whether these programmes actually result in business creation, employment generation and long-term entrepreneurial success, which raises a serious question about how entrepreneurship education is measured and evaluated.
Completion rates are the wrong measure
Entrepreneurship education has evolved considerably over the past two decades. Historically, programmes focused on developing entrepreneurial awareness, introducing business concepts and cultivating entrepreneurial thinking. While these remain important objectives, the approach must go further than building knowledge alone.
The research is consistent on this point: knowledge acquisition alone does not produce entrepreneurs. What matters is whether graduates go on to create ventures, generate employment and contribute to broader economic outcomes; and whether the education they received had any meaningful role in making that happen. That demands a very different kind of learning environment from the traditional lecture room.
The challenge is that many entrepreneurship programmes continue to prioritise classroom-based learning. Students often graduate with a sound understanding of business plans, marketing strategies, financial forecasting and opportunity recognition. However, many have limited exposure to the practical realities of launching and sustaining a business in competitive markets, and a disconnect often emerges between entrepreneurial knowledge and entrepreneurial practice.
Entrepreneurship education requires entrepreneurial ecosystems
Global evidence suggests that entrepreneurship education is most effective when embedded within broader entrepreneurial ecosystems. According to Neck and Greene (2011), entrepreneurship should be taught as a method rather than simply as a body of knowledge. This requires students to engage in experimentation, opportunity identification, problem-solving and venture development within authentic learning environments.
Successful entrepreneurial ecosystems typically combine formal education with mentoring, incubation, industry engagement, networking opportunities and access to innovation infrastructure. These environments give aspiring entrepreneurs opportunities to test ideas, develop prototypes, receive expert feedback and refine business models before entering the market.
Research by Morris et al. (2013) shows that experiential learning approaches improve entrepreneurial competencies, including innovation, resilience, adaptability and opportunity recognition, pointing to a clear conclusion: entrepreneurship education alone is insufficient. The ecosystem surrounding the learner is what determines the outcome.
Rethinking entrepreneurship education in South Africa
South Africa’s entrepreneurial environment presents unique challenges. Entrepreneurs often face limited access to finance, regulatory barriers, infrastructure constraints and competitive market conditions. These realities require entrepreneurship education to extend beyond teaching students how to write business plans or understand entrepreneurial theory.
Instead, institutions must create environments where students can actively engage in innovation, enterprise development and entrepreneurial problem-solving. This means shifting from teaching entrepreneurship as a subject to facilitating it as an activity.
Some higher education institutions are beginning to recognise the value of ecosystem-based approaches that connect academic learning directly with enterprise development.
Building entrepreneurial capacity through experiential learning
Some institutions are already putting this into practice. For example, at Regent Business School, an integrated approach to entrepreneurship education combines innovation spaces, enterprise incubation and industry engagement to give students direct exposure to the realities of business development.
The institution’s iLeadLAB, an innovation and makerspace environment, gives students access to practical problem-solving, design thinking, prototyping and hands-on technology. Students are encouraged to experiment, iterate, fail, learn and improve. These experiences closely resemble those faced by working entrepreneurs. Rather than learning about innovation in theory, students engage directly in innovation practice.
This is complemented by structured enterprise support: mentorship, business incubation and practical guidance that help students move from entrepreneurial intention to entrepreneurial action. Alongside this, industry engagement and professional networking initiatives expose students to employers and practitioners, building the commercial awareness and adaptability that the labour market demands.
The value of this model lies not in any single programme but in the way these elements work together. When education, incubation and industry engagement operate as a connected system rather than separate offerings, students are better placed to develop the capabilities that sustainable entrepreneurship requires.
Measuring what matters
Despite these positive developments, a significant challenge remains: South Africa lacks a consistent framework for evaluating the outcomes of entrepreneurship education.
Too often, programme success is measured through participation statistics rather than entrepreneurial impact. While enrolment numbers, attendance records and completion rates provide useful administrative information, they reveal little about whether entrepreneurship education is achieving its intended objectives.
A more meaningful evaluation framework should consider indicators such as:
- New venture creation rates
- Business survival after two and five years
- Employment generated by graduate-owned enterprises
- Revenue growth among supported businesses
- Access to funding and investment opportunities
- Innovation outputs and commercialisation activities
These indicators would give policymakers, funders and educational institutions a clearer picture of which interventions genuinely contribute to entrepreneurial development and economic growth. Outcome-based measurement would also incentivise institutions to prioritise practical entrepreneurial success rather than programme delivery alone.
Where next for entrepreneurship education?
South Africa needs more entrepreneurs, but what it needs more are sustainable ones: those capable of building resilient businesses that create employment and contribute to long-term economic development.
The future of entrepreneurship education should therefore be measured not by the number of individuals who complete programmes, but by the number who successfully launch, sustain and grow businesses. This requires a shift in how entrepreneurship education is conceptualised, delivered and evaluated.
There are encouraging signs that institutions are acting on this, embedding experiential learning, entrepreneurial ecosystems and enterprise support into their offerings. The challenge now is to ensure that these initiatives are accompanied by robust outcome measurement frameworks capable of demonstrating genuine entrepreneurial impact.
Only then will South Africa be able to determine whether its substantial investment in entrepreneurship education is producing entrepreneurs who create sustainable value, or merely graduates who understand entrepreneurship in theory.
Author Bio:
Dr Shaheen Khan is a Senior Academic and Programme Coordinator at REGENT Business School, where he oversees several undergraduate and postgraduate business programmes. He serves as Chairperson of the Programme Design, Development and Review (PDDR) Committee and has more than 15 years of experience in higher education. Dr Khan holds a Doctor of Business Administration (DBA), an MBA in Project Management, a BCom Honours in Marketing Management and a Bachelor of Commerce in Economics. His research interests include digital transformation, entrepreneurship education, artificial intelligence in higher education, business innovation and digital marketing strategy. His doctoral research examined the influence of digital marketing on student recruitment within South African private higher education institutions.
References
Fayolle, A. and Gailly, B. (2015) ‘The impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial attitudes and intention: Hysteresis and persistence’, Journal of Small Business Management, 53(1), pp. 75–93.
Morris, M.H., Webb, J.W., Fu, J. and Singhal, S. (2013) ‘A competency-based perspective on entrepreneurship education: Conceptual and empirical insights’, Journal of Small Business Management, 51(3), pp. 352–369.
Nabi, G., Liñán, F., Fayolle, A., Krueger, N. and Walmsley, A. (2017) ‘The impact of entrepreneurship education in higher education: A systematic review and research agenda’, Academy of Management Learning and Education, 16(2), pp. 277–299.
Neck, H.M. and Greene, P.G. (2011) ‘Entrepreneurship education: Known worlds and new frontiers’, Journal of Small Business Management, 49(1), pp. 55–70.
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