Entrepreneurship Education and Self-Employment Intention in Ethiopian Universities: A Moderated Mediation Analysis of Self-Efficacy and Institutional Support

Abstract Entrepreneurship education has become a key policy instrument to address youth unemployment in developing countries but the mechanisms behind the implementation of entrepreneurship education to affect self-employment intentions have not been studied extensively in the African context. In this study, we studied the direct and indirect impact of entrepreneurship education (EE) on self-employment intention (SEI) among university students and staff in Ethiopia by analyzing the mediating role of self-efficacy (SE) and Gender Equity (GEq) and the moderating role of institutional support (IS). We conducted a cross-sectional survey of 392 students and staff at four universities in Ethiopia and used Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and PROCESS macro (Model 14) to test the moderated mediation model. We found that entrepreneurship education had a significant positive direct effect on self-employment intention (B = 0.380, p < 0.001), accounting for 62.7% of the variance (R² = 0.627). We found that self-efficacy (B = 0.159 and p < 0.001) and gender equity (B = 0.640 and p < 0.001) were significant predictors of self-employment intention. The indirect effect with self-efficacy was significant for all levels of institutional support (0.4308 for low support and 0.2367 for high support) while the Index of Moderated Mediation demonstrated significant moderation (0.2850, 95% BootCI [0.0854, 0.4632]). These findings contribute to entrepreneurship education theory that institutional support conditions the indirect effect of entrepreneurship education on self-employment intention with self-efficacy and have implications for curriculum design and policy development in developing countries.