Business Education Skills Acquisition and Youths’ Engagement in Community Development in Rivers State

The purpose of the study was to evaluate Business education skills acquisition and youths’ engagement in community development in Rivers state. Three research questions and three hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study adopted the correlational research design. The area of study of this study was Rivers State. The population of the study comprised one thousand two hundred (1,200) youths in Rivers State. The sample size of the study comprised the entire one hundred and eighty-three (183) youths in the Area of the study in Rivers State. A self-constructed questionnaire was used for data collection. The questionnaire is labeled “Evaluation of Business education skills acquisition and youths development Questionnaire. To establish the reliability of the instrument, test retest method was employed by the researcher. The instrument was pretested through test retest method by using thirty (20) youths from Rivers State with the reliability coefficient value of 0.78 for the instrument which means that the instrument is reliable and therefore considered appropriate for the study. The instrument was administered by the researcher to the respondents in the sampled area. The researcher personally reached the respondents in the sampled areas and administered the instruments to them by hand. The study adopted descriptive statistics such as Mean (X) and Standard Deviation to answer research questions and Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation for testing of the hypotheses. Based on findings and conclusion of the study, the following recommendations are made: Youths should be encouraged to acquire entrepreneurial skills to enable them engage in community development, Government should provide funds for the training and retraining of youths on how to manage their Businesses to enable them engage in community development and that Government should provide funds and equipment and machines as to encourage youth acquisition of Business education skills for easy access to participation in community development.