Influence of training on youths’ knowledge, perception, and attitude to entrepreneurship to reduce unemployment in Ogun Conference of Seventh-day Adventist Church

Abstract

Unemployment amongst employable youths in Nigeria is at an alarming rate. This has led so many youths to different vices like internet fraud, ritual killings, armed robbery, prostitution, kidnapping, child trafficking and several others. To this end, many government dispensations in Nigeria introduced programmes aimed at solving the challenge of unemployment in the nation. Many of the programmes seemed to have failed to yield significant results. This study therefore, sought to determine if exposure to entrepreneurship training over a period of four weeks would positively influence the knowledge, perception and attitudinal disposition of youths in selected districts to entrepreneurship as a way of reducing unemployment among youths in Ogun Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Nigeria. This research employed the quasi-experimental method. Three districts in Ilishan-Remo were purposively selected for the experimental group while Ijebu-Ode district was selected for control group in this study. Forty-four youths were selected from each of the two districts. The experiment lasted for four weeks. In the first week, structured questionnaire was administered to the respondents at the baseline; the same instrument was used for data gathering at the endline of the study. Data were analysed using paired t-test and Anova. Practical demonstration of the respondents’ understanding of how to produce each of the products, showed their proficiency in the production of each of the products. Quantitative data also revealed respondents’ understanding of the problem of unemployment in Nigeria. Endline data showed statistically significant difference in the participants’ knowledge, perception and attitudinal disposition to entrepreneurship as against baseline data across all the tested variables. The study did not record statistically significant difference in the demographic variables of gender and income and the knowledge, perception and attitudinal disposition of the respondents to entrepreneurship. However, the study findings showed difference in the adoption of entrepreneurship with age. This probably means that as youths grow older, the quest for white collar job reduces while their focus shifts to getting a legitimate means of livelihood. Data from the study revealed statistically significant improvement in participants’ knowledge, perception and attitudinal disposition to entrepreneurship. The study therefore concludes that intervention programme using apprenticeship model is effective in training youths in becoming entrepreneurs. The study recommends introduction of entrepreneurship to school curricular at every level of education in Nigeria.