Factors Affecting University Student’s Entrepreneurial Intention: The Case Of Ambo University

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.