Abstract:
Unemployment rates in developing countries like Ethiopia are a significant challenge, with
governments lacking resources to support the unemployed workforce. This research aims to study the
impact of cultural values, entrepreneurial intentions, risk-taking, personal attitude, entrepreneurship
education, and demographic characteristics on university students' entrepreneurial intentions. This
research will be a value addition in Ethiopia as well as sub-Saharan Africa scenario as it will provide
knowledge base for entrepreneurship in the region and country. A quantitative approaches, research
design and simple random sampling were adopted. Data was collected from the sample of 248
university students. Descriptive statistics, correlation, regression analysis and hierarchical regression
analysis was used to analyze the data with the aid of SPSS version 23 and regression method was used
to compute mediation analysis. The results shows, entrepreneurship education has a strong factor
effect between the aforementioned constructs and entrepreneurial intentions among university
students. The entrepreneurial intentions of students are influenced directly by the students’ Cultural
Value, Entrepreneurial Intentions, Risk taking, Personal attitude, Demographics, Entrepreneurship
Education, and students and indirectly by self- efficacy. It can be concluded that self-efficacy can
contribute significantly to development of students’ entrepreneurial intention when mediated by
entrepreneurship education. However demographical characteristics (Gender and marital status),
were insignificant with the intentions of students to become entrepreneur. The findings call for ministry
of higher education and universities to emphasize more on entrepreneurship education in developing
personal skills, attributes and behavioral aspects to realize the full potentials of students with regards
to entrepreneurial intention. However, more in-depth studies need to be undertaken to fully understand
determinants of entrepreneurial intention at a country and regional level.
