Transferability of Entrepreneurial Interest to Establishing Businesses by Ghanaian Tertiary Graduates

Technical Universities and Ho Technical University for that matter introduced entrepreneurship education to develop entrepreneurial skills in students to augment the knowledge acquired from their various disciplines. The study, therefore, sought to find out if tertiary graduates are taking advantage of the entrepreneurial skills acquired to set up business ventures and if there are mitigating factors that hinder the setting up of such businesses. This longitudinal research collected primary data through telephone calls from 265 respondents out of the 801 participants with a mean age of 28 years. This is the most desirable way of collecting the data because the participants were scattered all over the country and responded to the items according to their ideological and geographical positions. Results obtained indicated that 52.8% of the respondents were employees, 18.9% set up personal businesses, 3.8% were employees and at the same time running private businesses in services and commerce, whilst 24.5% are still looking for jobs after graduating from school. These results are evident because respondents indicated that financing personal businesses were difficult tasks coupled with no knowledge about the availability of support agencies (90.6%) to facilitate their businesses and usher young entrepreneurs into establishing private businesses. Participants who set up their businesses stated that the source of capital was mainly from personal savings and support from friends and families, because they could not afford to pay huge interest on loans. The study concluded that not many graduates ventured into personal businesses due to some negative factors. In addition, young female entrepreneurs were more than their male counterpart and were mostly harassed in the industry. It is, therefore, imperative that lecturers of entrepreneurship education and policymakers make frantic efforts to connect young entrepreneurs especially the females to various support agencies with emphasis on the cultivation of interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary faculty to accommodate individual teaching and learning styles.