Graduate Entrepreneurship in Tanzania: Contextual Enablers and Hindrances

Abstract

In Tanzania, despite efforts in teaching entrepreneurship at universities, recent tracer-studies have reported falling rates of graduate self-employment. Among the factors that contribute to this decline, the Tanzanian entrepreneurial environment plays an ambivalent role. Based on the concept of entrepreneurial embeddedness, the personal stories of ten Tanzanian graduate entrepreneurs are content-analyzed. The results suggest that embeddedness in the social environment is not of a singular but of a mixed nature. Tanzanian graduate entrepreneurs operate in a developing environment characterized by complex, partly converging and partly conflicting contextual forces, which simultaneously advance and impede entrepreneurial activities. On the one hand, the changed political climate, strong family ties, emerging links with countries like China, and improved banking and taxation systems are among the factors conducive to graduate entrepreneurship in Tanzania. On the other hand, however, the lack of start-up capital, inhibitive banking and taxation, issues of trust, poor technology, corruption, and cheap imports from countries such as China discourage graduate entrepreneurs' business ventures. While current national policies emphasize graduate entrepreneurship, there is a failure to implement these policies at lower government level. Amidst inflexible higher learning institutions, educators are challenged to innovate ways in which entrepreneurship courses will address issues that entrepreneurs face in Tanzania.