ETHIOPIA
In Ethiopia, there have been many attempts to create mechanisms that facilitate employability and encourage the development of entrepreneurial skills by universities.
However, past efforts have been ineffective in curbing the unemployment rate, mainly due to macroeconomic factors such as slow structural transformation, limited domestic savings and investment, low and fluctuating foreign direct investment, soaring inflation, and the inability of the private sector to create jobs.
Similarly, the efforts of universities to institute support schemes to enable young graduates to meet the demands of the job market have also been ineffective.
The establishment of the Center for Employment and Entrepreneurship Development (CEED) across all universities is the latest effort to tackle this challenge. Towards this end, the Ethiopian Ministry of Education has issued an operational guideline to higher education institutions when they establish these centres.
The guideline is an outcome of the agreement between the ministry and Dereja, a private firm that forms part of Info Mind Solutions Plc, a human resource organisation focusing on equipping fresh graduates with the skills, guidance and opportunities needed to navigate the job market successfully.
It is expected to address a significant gap in the sector with regard to setting up well-functioning and -organised centres that can address issues of employability and innovation.
However, the suggestions made are not utterly new. Similar recommendations were made in a 2015 study on the entrepreneurial profile and activities of Ethiopian universities. It was initiated by the then Higher Education Strategy Center (now defunct) in collaboration with the Maastricht School of Management in the Netherlands within the context of Ethiopia’s University Leadership and Management Capacity Development project funded by EP-Nuffic, an organisation which provides information about internationalisation in higher education.
The new initiative should, therefore, be regarded as a continuation of past efforts and only a small step to tackle the challenges of employability. This is because addressing the issues of entrepreneurship and innovation will require more than a single operational guideline. It will have to consider other important factors within and beyond the reach of institutions.
Past efforts and new need
There have been a variety of efforts by different ministries and agencies in Ethiopia to introduce the concepts of entrepreneurship and job creation in their own sectors. The importance of entrepreneurship and its embodiment in the Ethiopian higher education sector has a long history.
Efforts in the sector perhaps began with an introductory course on entrepreneurship offered in all higher education institutions decades back.
However, such courses have often been criticised as being too theoretical, lacking concrete local business cases, lacking integration with students’ fields of studies and failure to engage with the needs of local beneficiaries. The impact of ill-trained teachers on course delivery has also been noted.
The most recent sectoral efforts in this regard may be the incorporation of the need for entrepreneurship education into the 2018 Education Roadmap, and the government scheme initiated in the same year to improve the employment of university graduates with the specific target of creating degree-relevant employment for 80% or above of graduates within one year.
Spearheaded by the then ministry of science and higher education (now the Ministry of Education) through a management improvement scheme called ‘deliverology’, direction was given to universities to meet the targets set, and report on their performance annually. Achievements and developments in this area have been fuzzy lately, due to a dearth of information at national level.
The new call for the establishment of the Center for Employment and Entrepreneurship Development is expected to play a crucial role in equipping students with the employability and entrepreneurial skills needed to meet the demands of the job market.
Accordingly, the vision of the centre is set “to make universities the leading catalyst for youth employment and entrepreneurship in Ethiopia by empowering students and graduates with the skills, mindset, and opportunities to thrive in a dynamic and inclusive economy”.
The centre seeks to enhance the career readiness and entrepreneurial capacity of university students through a structured, unified approach. The plan is to offer centralised services in career guidance, skills development, innovation, and business incubation, bridging the gap between education and the labour market through strategic partnerships, innovation and inclusive support systems.
Requirements of the new guideline
The CEED operational guideline is designed to serve as a practical guide for universities, career development practitioners, administrative staff, entrepreneurship coordinators and other stakeholders, outlining essential procedures, service delivery models, stakeholder engagement strategies, and monitoring and evaluation mechanisms.
It incorporates eight focus areas that institutions are required to be engaged in. These include infrastructure development, resource mobilisation, stakeholder engagement and partnerships, a service delivery framework, target audience management, quality assurance and compliance, and sustainability and transition planning.
The above areas closely relate to the 2015 proposal made for the creation of Ethiopian entrepreneurial universities focusing on seven categories derived from the online self-assessment tool for European Entrepreneurial Higher Education Institutions named HEInnovate: leadership and governance; organisational capacity, people and incentives; higher education institution-business or external relationships for knowledge exchange; entrepreneurship development in teaching and learning; pathways for entrepreneurs; the entrepreneurial higher education institution as an internationalised institution; and measuring the impact.
Among others, the new guideline proposes an extensive list of infrastructural requirements for CEED, with detailed furnishing standards, assuming a fully integrated facility with multiple offices, counselling rooms, training spaces, digital centres, co-working areas, incubation spaces and creative hubs. It also lists extensive physical and digital resource requirements across equipment, software and shared facilities.
The expectations are overwhelming and may not reflect the diverse priorities and resource constraints of differentiated Ethiopian institutions. Such ambitious demands could also discourage universities, many of which already struggle to meet the demands of their essential units like research and quality assurance offices.
Similarly, the guideline outlines wide-ranging requirements for budget planning, capital and recurrent expenditures, revenue-generation, funding sources, human resources and governance structures. Much of the content included appears to be fit for a human resource or administrative manual rather than an operational guideline developed to support a single centre.
While in this section external income-generation is emphasised as a funding stream, the guideline offers little clarity on institutional financial commitments or leadership engagement – both of which are critical for sustainability.
The service delivery section of the guideline is detailed and useful, offering clear descriptions of CEED’s major services and outlining processes for mobilisation, registration, support and continuous improvement. It provides practical guidance for institutions seeking to operationalise CEED activities.
In its stakeholder section, the guideline clearly outlines roles and responsibilities for various stakeholders, including the ministry, universities, CEED units, academic staff, students and alumni, despite the difference in the details offered for each.
The long-standing challenge of fostering effective university-industry collaboration remains unaddressed, given the limited success in this area. Real progress requires strategic incentives, government support, and coordinated efforts beyond the university level. It is not clear how, in the absence of such external support, the CEED plans to achieve what it sets out to do.
Furthermore, the guideline identifies primary and secondary beneficiaries and proposes mechanisms for monitoring, evaluation and reporting. It also outlines sustainability strategies which indicate the need for long-term strategies.
However, achieving these useful goals remains difficult, given existing resource constraints and limited external funding opportunities that need clear government directions and incentives for those who wish to support such initiatives.
Beyond setting up an entrepreneurship centre
Overall, the demand for the establishment of a centre with clear responsibilities to promote the critical elements of entrepreneurship and innovation is a positive development, although long overdue.
The comprehensive and well-structured nature of the operational guideline provides clear operational directions for universities and stakeholders. However, despite covering the common ground expected in such a document, the guideline fails to be realistic in terms of its exaggerated resource demands and the little room for flexibility which can affect the autonomy, priorities and needs of individual institutions.
It is also not clear how the current guideline aligns with previous ministry directions along similar lines. More needs to be said to facilitate the guideline’s link with existing practices and its smooth implementation at both national and institutional levels.
In Ethiopia, the lack of consistency and long-term planning appears to be a persistent problem that pervades national operations, affecting the success of many initiatives led by the ministry.
Despite its comprehensive treatment of many issues, the CEED guideline leaves much to be desired with regard to important components such as curriculum integration, leadership roles, and tracer studies which are all essential pillars of any entrepreneurship and innovation framework.
A curricular framework is often needed to align academic curricula with labour-market demands and the skills required in an entrepreneurial and innovation-driven economy. This includes establishing clear mechanisms for embedding entrepreneurship education across disciplines, shifting from predominantly theoretical instruction to approaches that cultivate practical, real-world competencies and experiential learning. Guidance on how this is done should be included in the CEED guideline, which does not say much on curriculum except in the brief context of module development.
Similarly, the guideline only briefly touches upon leadership roles, and graduate tracer studies which warrant a dedicated operational focus, given their critical role in informing the centre’s strategic direction and ensuring the effectiveness of its core responsibilities.
In addition to creating proper alignment with the labour market needs, graduate tracking, which involves collecting information on graduates’ career development, can help understand, monitor, and improve higher education institutions’ performance. It offers a unique opportunity to contextualise the employment outcomes of university graduates and develop an in-depth understanding of the nature of employment, underemployment, and unemployment with a view to improving future performance.
In general, the CEED needs to provide detailed guidelines on these critical areas of engagement as it has for other operational directions, given the lack of a formal and organised system in many institutions concerning their use.
Although contents about external factors may not necessarily be expected, the CEED does not also offer much on how the success of the scheme and institutional responses might be affected as a result of external intervening factors.
Such factors may include the broader national economic development strategies, government policies and regulatory frameworks that include access to finance, inter-ministerial coordination, and partnerships with the private sector and civil-society actors.
The CEED guideline does not clearly articulate how these broader considerations should be integrated or leveraged. In reality, policy directions and practical initiatives in higher education need to accommodate the increasing complexities of graduates’ transition into the labour market and the interplays between universities, economy and government.
Strategies which demand universities to respond to the challenges of graduate employment on their own may be regarded as overly simplistic and flawed. Ideas and suggestions for improvement need to be supported by a broader conceptualisation and coherent national employability framework that provides sustainable strategies and workable directions.
Among others, this underscores the need for a national-level roadmap for enterprise and entrepreneurship education that ensures continuity throughout the system and aligns institutional initiatives with national priorities.
In this regard, the role of the ministry remains pivotal in providing strategic direction, ensuring coherence, and facilitating cross-sectoral and ministerial collaborations that are critical to the success of a useful initiative such as the CEED, but which cannot be pursued in isolation.
Wondwosen Tamrat (PhD) is an associate professor of higher education and founding president of St Mary’s University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He is the coordinator of the Private Higher Education sub-cluster of the Continental Education Strategy for Africa (CESA) and a board member of the International Association of Universities (IAU). He can be reached at preswond@smuc.edu.et or wondwosen@gmail.com.
This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.
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