ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION FOR YOUTH IN CLOTHING AND TEXTILES: ADVANCING WORKFORCE QUALITY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN SOUTH-WESTERN, NIGERIA

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is acclaimed the world over, as education for the acquisition of skills for gainful employment and wealth creation in clothing and textiles. This study aimed at identifying entrepreneurship skills required by youths in reduction of unemployment and economic development of Nigeria. Entrepreneurship education skill is designed to satisfy the manpower needs of the nation. It enhances sustainable development in clothing and textiles by fostering innovation, environmental awareness and social responsibility. The study adopted survey research while multi-stage sampling procedure was used to select respondents for the study.
Thesample consisted of 600 respondents who are 150 graduates and 450 undergraduates from the selected states for the study. Questionnaire was used to collect data to answer the research question. T-test was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance while descriptive statistics was employed. The findings show among others that entrepreneurship education programmes have a significant relationship with employment reduction among youths in Southwest Nigeria.

The study also showed that there is significant difference between the mean responses of graduate and undergraduate students in clothing and textiles entrepreneurship education on economic growth among youths in Southwest Nigeria, t(598) = 2.906, p < 0.05. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended that training and retraining of entrepreneurial education personnel should be encouraged so as to boost their performance. Entrepreneurial education students should be given the needed support and encouragement to produce goods and services in order to reduce dependency ratio.