Educating Entrepreneurial Citizens

Neoliberalism and Youth Livelihoods in Tanzania

Joan DeJaeghere

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367203764
• eBook ISBN: 9781315535593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Emprendimiento

Educating Entrepreneurial Citizens examines the multiple and contradictory purposes and effects of entrepreneurship education aimed at addressing youth unemployment and alleviating poverty in Tanzania.

Governments in sub-Saharan Africa face increasing pressure to educate young people through secondary school, supposedly equipping them with knowledge and skills for employment and their future. At the same time, many youths do not complete their education and there are insufficient jobs to employ graduates. The development community sees entrepreneurship education as one viable solution to the double edged problem of inadequate education and few jobs. But while entrepreneurship education is aligned with a governing rationality of neoliberalism that requires individuals to create their own livelihoods without government social supports, the two NGO programs discussed in this book draw on a rights-based discourse that seeks to educate those not served by government schools, providing them with educational and social supports to be included in society. The chapters explore the tensions that occur when international organizations and NGOs draw on both neoliberal and liberal human rights discourses to address the problems of poverty, unemployment and poor quality education. Furthermore, when these neo/liberal perspectives meet local ideas of reciprocity and solidarity, they create friction and alter the programs and effects they have on youth.

The book introduces the concept of entrepreneurial citizens —those who utilize their innovative skills and behaviors to claim both economic and social rights from which they had been previously excluded. The programs taught youth how to develop their own enterprises, to earn profits, and to save for their own futures; but youth used their education, skills and labor to provide for basic needs, to be included in society, and to support their and their families' well-being. By showing the contradictory effects of entrepreneurship education programs, the book asks international agencies and governments to consider how they can go beyond technical approaches of creating enterprises and increasing income, and head toward approaches that consider the kinds of labor that young people and communities value for their wellbeing.

This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of education and international development, youth studies, African Studies and entrepreneurship/social entrepreneurship education.

Chapter 1
Introduction

This school is very good because it saved me from a bad and vulnerable environment [and put me] into a good kind of environment. … I’m so grateful because I had dropped out of school and lost all hope of coming back. … But now I think I’m approaching my goals.

– Upendo, 18 years old, 2012¹

I first met young Tanzanian women like Upendo in 2011.² They were excited and nervous about returning to secondary school, as it held the promise of ‘becoming an educated person’ (Levinson et al., 1996). When they finished primary school, they stayed home and helped with the family duka (small business) or shamba (subsistence farm), or watched their younger siblings. Most did not imagine that they would ever have the opportunity to pursue a secondary education; they had received messages from their primary school teachers that they were not ‘smart enough’. Or, their parents were not able to pay fees for a private school if their primary exam scores were too low to continue in government schools. What does it mean to be considered educated in Tanzania? Usually, having an education means completing O-levels (lower secondary) and passing enough of the exams for mathematics, biology, geography, English, physics, civics education, and Swahili to get the certificate. But if Upendo does not get her O-level certificate, what kind of educated person is she? How would she achieve her imagined future and what kind of livelihood would she have?

The secondary school that Upendo was attending was implementing a nongovernmental organization (NGO) program that was different from most secondary and vocational schools in Tanzania. The NGO program integrated entrepreneurship education into formal secondary and vocational school curriculum and extracurricular activities, including additional content and pedagogy of entrepreneurship, financial education, and business skills. The entrepreneurship curriculum and pedagogy were intricately linked with business development on the school campus. To support the school budget, the school administration and teachers developed full-scale school enterprises run by teachers and the students. There were also microenterprises that students developed to learn how to manage, sell, and calculate profit and loss. For the larger scale enterprises, administrators worked with the NGO, Parka (a pseudonym),³ to develop a business plan that would help the school become self-sufficient one day. They conducted a market analysis to determine which businesses were most relevant for the area and which ones the school could operate successfully. The staff was responsible for tracking all the expenses, income, and profits of campus-based businesses. These school-wide and microenterprises served two purposes: to raise money for the school to become self-reliant and to give students practical experience in entrepreneurship.

I was skeptical of integrating entrepreneurship education into formal schooling. I wondered how families and the community would perceive secondary education that focused on business and entrepreneurial skills. Tanzania’s formal school system, which evolved under British colonialism and persists today in many ways, prepares students for higher education and the formal labor market; working in agriculture and some vocational fields were not as valued and did not require a secondary school certificate. While Julius Nyerere’s policy of Education for Self-Reliance (ESR) tried to change this long-held attitude, neither the labor market nor state policies prioritized vocational education, or entrepreneurship. Learning to be self-employed is not the goal of most young people or their parents for attending formal education. In addition, having young people run microenterprises is often perceived as begging, especially if they are selling on the street or in a market (Tripp, 1997). Yet the reality is that family-based microenterprises are not only common in Tanzania, but they are necessary. Without this primary or secondary source of income, many families would not be able to pay school fees, health care costs, and other expenses. I was concerned that young Tanzanians’ hopes of being ‘educated’, which traditionally meant passing O-level exams and heading toward other educational opportunities, would be detoured by a path of entrepreneurship and business education. They would have more opportunities than if they had not had any post-primary education, but this alternate trajectory might leave them undervalued in their communities – disillusioned and struggling for their future.

In a different context in northwestern Tanzania, another international NGO, Apprentice, (a pseudonym) implemented a vocational and apprenticeship program that taught entrepreneurship and self-employment for young men and women who had not completed secondary school. This program includes short-term (nine months) non-formal training where the young women and men learn specific trades, and business, financial and life skills. In this case, I was concerned that while the youths would learn a specific set of skills, they would have limited opportunities to use them because of other constraints they might face, even if their skills were aligned with local market needs. In addition, I worried that if the labor and consumer markets could not support their livelihoods, these young Tanzanians would not have the literacy or numeracy skills to pursue post-secondary vocational training.

These two NGO programs are different in several ways. Parka takes place in formal secondary and vocational schools; thus, their curriculum, testing, and certification are aligned and regulated by the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MoEVT), as well as the Vocational Education and Training Authority (VETA). Apprentice is a non-formal training program, aligned with the national vocational/technical curriculum but not under government auspices. However, they share some common educational practices, including coursework on entrepreneurship and financial education, and a common goal: fostering entrepreneurial skills and a mindset that enables self-employment. Additionally, they are funded by the same international foundation interested in addressing youth unemployment through comprehensive livelihood and entrepreneurship education and training.⁴

I was also intrigued by a seemingly dual purpose of these NGO projects that aim, on the one hand, to offer education and training for those who are out of school, not participating in the labor market, and have few other material or social supports. In this sense, the two NGOs draw on a rights-based discourse of Education for All (EFA) in order to ensure inclusion in society and to reduce poverty and its effects. On the other hand, entrepreneurship education and training aim to integrate youths into a capitalist economy that requires them to hustle, seek profit, and fend for themselves with few supports for the educational, work, and health needs they had. It is this ‘strange conjunction’ of ‘pro-poor’ and neoliberal, which Ferguson (2010, p. 174) refers to, that prompted me to ask how entrepreneurship education and youth livelihoods training prepare young Tanzanians to be citizens,⁵ and what kind of citizens they are becoming. Would this education allow marginalized youths to be included in society, to choose how they participate in the labor market, and to seek their dreams and future livelihoods that would allow them to be socially, emotionally, and materially better off than they or their families were? Or would entrepreneurship education and training put them on a path that has limited opportunities, and not necessarily transform their material or social lives as they had hoped? In this way, I see entrepreneurship education and training as a technique of governmentality, a set of ideas and ways of thinking taught through curricular and educational practices that aim to foster particular kinds of citizens (Dean, 2010).

These questions about the means and ends of education programs, such as entrepreneurship and skills for work, are at the heart of development agendas and debates. The goals of international development are multiple: to foster sustainable economic growth; to end poverty; to address inequalities; and to educate particularly the younger generation, to contribute economically and, secondarily, socially and culturally,⁶ to society. The National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty (NSGRP, or MKUKUTA in Swahili) in Tanzania reflects these diverse goals, as the government must align with the international development agenda in order to receive aid. These goals are contested with regard to how to achieve them, as are the roles that international agencies and NGOs play in development and poverty reduction. For instance, does vocational and – even more recently – entrepreneurship education achieve primarily these economic goals, or does it also achieve the social and political ones? If so, which ones are achieved, for whom, and under what conditions? And what are the unintended consequences of and contradictions in achieving these goals?

The question of whether and how certain skill sets – particularly entrepreneurship – could improve the livelihood opportunities and outcomes for a burgeoning youth population is one being asked broadly in the development community. Governments in sub-Saharan Africa face increasing pressure to educate young people beyond primary school; at the same time, with the growing population of educated youths, there are insufficient job opportunities to employ them all. The development community sees entrepreneurship education as one viable solution to this ‘problem’. The programs that form the basis of the analysis in this book were supported by an international foundation that aimed to address the problem of youth unemployment. The international foundation’s and the NGOs’ original purpose of the evaluation project that I led was to answer this question:

Did these NGO entrepreneurship education and training programs address the problem of unemployment for youths in these communities, and if so, what were the short and long-term effects on youths?

They were particularly interested in what youths were learning, how they were earning and if and how they were saving, and in turn, investing in and sustaining their enterprises or their livelihoods (see, for example Krause et al., 2016; Krause et al., 2013).

Over time, it became clearer to me that the foundation, the NGO staff and the youths themselves had multiple goals and varying understandings of what entrepreneurship education and training meant for youth livelihoods. Additionally, these programs produced particular meanings and outcomes of entrepreneurship in local contexts (see, for example, DeJaeghere et al., 2016). I began to ask questions about how the different international and local discourses about development and purposes of education encounter each other, are changed, and in turn, effect some notion of the kind of citizens these young people are becoming (see DeJaeghere, 2013, 2014). In this book, then, I aim to examine five years of longitudinal data from these programs and youths to explore how they utilize dominant international development discourses and local Tanzanian political, economic and social practices. I explore the frictions that occur in how entrepreneurship education and training is conceptualized and implemented and how these programs produce, at times, contradictory effects on youth’s lives and livelihoods (Tsing, 2005). Tsing’s idea of friction considers how, in the confluence of discourses, there is not only resistance, but also transformation. When global, universalizing ideas and practices meet local ones, some energy is lost but new energy and forms emerge.

Through an analysis of NGO entrepreneurship education and training and the youths who participate in these programs, the chapters in this book show how entrepreneurship education and training is taken up and repurposed in locally specific ways in Tanzanian communities. Tanzania is a particularly interesting case to examine how global and local discourses of development and education encounter each other given its history of strong socialist governing (1962–1985) and the shifts toward neoliberal policies in the 1980s and 1990s, with vestiges of both persisting in governing, economic policies, and education practices today. I aim to illustrate throughout the book how entrepreneurship education and training, usually associated with a hegemonic neoliberal idea of the ‘enterprising self’ (Rose, 1998) in the wake of a retreating state (Harvey, 2005), is reshaped by the specific political and social contexts in Tanzania, its national education system, and young people’s realities in specific local contexts. Similar to Mains (2012) and Ferguson (2010, 2015), this analysis is based on the assumption that neoliberalism and its effects on young people’s subjectivities as citizens are not monolithic; they have many variations. On the one hand, entrepreneurship education is implemented within a neoliberal orientation, with concern for economic growth, consumerism and markets of a global capitalist economy (Gibson-Graham, 2006).⁷ On the other hand, entrepreneurial mindsets, skills and enterprise development take place within social and economic relations in informal, community and moral economies in Tanzania (Tripp, 1997). These latter economic relations emphasize reciprocity, solidarity and exchange rather than individual profit, competition and regulation. These different ideas of economic and social life reveal potential convergences and contradictions in the ways that entrepreneurship education takes form among youths in poor communities.

This book has two main aims. One is to examine how global discourses frame entrepreneurship programs and how they are, in turn, implemented in local contexts in which specific political, economic, social, historical, and individual vectors meet. In analyzing how these global educational ideas and practices take form, I show how they are reshaped by some international actors and repurposed by Tanzanian governmental actors and educators to link to localized meanings and practices, particularly of Ujamaa⁸ and self-reliance.

A second – and more specific – aim is to answer the question: How are entrepreneurship education and training initiatives, implemented by international NGOs, reshaping the purposes and means of educating young people as citizens – as social, economic, and political members – of their communities, especially in contexts of poverty and unemployment in Tanzania? I consider how these initiatives construct youths as ‘educated’ or ‘skilled’ citizens. Additionally, I ask if and how young people who participate in these programs are included in society, able to secure rights and enact responsibilities – in essence, how they construct themselves as citizens.

Educating Tanzanian youths in changing social and economic times

The education⁹ of youths in a time of global economic change has prompted new reform efforts among national governments and international agencies globally. The past two decades have seen a growing youth population worldwide, increasing the demand for education and good jobs in the labor market. At the same time, the global economy experienced a downturn since the recession of 2008, and there has been a change in economic actors, trade patterns, and labor market sectors. While most sub-Saharan African countries experienced a higher-than-average growth rate in gross domestic product (GDP) during the last decade, this has not resulted in an equivalent decline in poverty across income levels, age groups, and geographical areas. For instance, the average GDP growth rate in Tanzania has been nearly 7% each year for the past decade and the percentage of the population living below the basic needs and extreme poverty levels has decreased (NBS, 2015; World Bank, 2006–2015). Those living in rural areas and youths, however, tend to be the most vulnerable to poverty and they did not experience the same level of improvement in living standards as those in urban areas (World Bank, 2006–2015).

Despite growth in some economies, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Neo/liberal Governmentality and Citizen Subjectivities
• 3 Approaches to Entrepreneurship Education
• 4 Researching the Tanzanian experience
• 5 Governing Regimes in Tanzania
• 6 Educating for Self-sufficiency: Schools, Markets, and Social Good
• 7 Becoming Entrepreneurial Citizens: Economic Development and Social Relations
• 8 Educating Youths as Financially Responsible and Inclusive Citizens
• 9 Conclusions: Reframing Entrepreneurship Education
• Appendix: Selected Economic, Education, and Youth Policies 1961–2015
• Index