ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION, DIGITAL PLATFORM UTILISATION AND MICRO-ENTERPRISE FORMATION AMONG UNIVERSITY UNDERGRADUATES IN NIGERIA

This study examined the effects of entrepreneurship education and digital platform utilisation on actual micro-enterprise formation among undergraduates of the University of Abuja, and tested whether the first relationship is conditional upon the second. Underpinned by human capital theory, the study adopted a descriptive survey design. Taro Yamane's formula was applied to an undergraduate population of 20,856 to determine a sample of 400, allocated across the thirteen faculties by Bowley's proportional allocation formula, yielding 358 usable responses. Data were analysed by descriptive statistics and hierarchical moderated multiple regression. A total of 62.6 per cent of respondents were found to be operating an income-generating venture, these ventures being predominantly solo-operated (83.0%), informal (92.0% unregistered) and concentrated in platform-mediated sectors. Entrepreneurship education exerted a significant but modest effect on micro-enterprise formation (β = .168, p < .01), while digital platform utilisation exerted an effect approximately two and a half times larger (β = .412, p < .001). The interaction term produced a significant increment in explained variance (ΔR² = .042, p < .001), the full model explaining 39.6 per cent of variance, and simple slopes analysis showed the education–formation relationship to be steep among students high in digital platform utilisation and effectively flat among those low in it. The study concludes that entrepreneurship education is conditionally rather than intrinsically effective, its return depending upon possession of the digital means through which student enterprise is in practice conducted. It is recommended that the National Universities Commission incorporate digital commercial competence as an assessed element of the entrepreneurship curriculum; that universities establish resourced entrepreneurship support facilities including seed funding; that instruction be reconstituted around experiential delivery with assessment attaching to demonstrated commercial activity; that practising entrepreneurs be engaged in curriculum delivery; and that policy attention be directed toward the survival, and not merely the formation, of student ventures.