The role and effectiveness of non-formal training programmes for entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic literature review

Margot Leger, Jelena Arsenijevic and Niels Bosma

Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 2025, vol. 37, issue 1-2, 214-247

Abstract: Entrepreneurship is growing in popularity as a tool to combat the challenges of unemployment and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa. A host of training programme offerings have emerged to mitigate the challenges of starting and sustaining a business in this context. Non-formal trainings (educational activities outside formal places of learning such as universities or schools) can help entrepreneurs develop essential business skills. A systematic literature review demonstrates how non-formal training programmes for entrepreneurship are evaluated across sub-Saharan Africa. We searched SCOPUS and EBSCO databases with the following keywords and their synonyms: ‘training’, ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘sub-Saharan Africa’. The final selection returned 49 articles that discuss non-formal training programmes in sub-Saharan Africa. Our results suggest significant variation in training types and their effectiveness. Beyond descriptive analytics, we show that a more nuanced understanding of the context-specific entrepreneurial environment needs to be considered when implementing and designing a programme and that this should be coupled with more rigorous effectiveness evaluations. We propose a deeper analysis of the role of human capital within the setting of local entrepreneurial ecosystems as well as the contextualization of training material and participant selection as a promising start to develop more effective training programmes for entrepreneurship.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/08985626.2024.2348046 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:entreg:v:37:y:2025:i:1-2:p:214-247

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TEPN20

DOI: 10.1080/08985626.2024.2348046

Access Statistics for this article

Entrepreneurship & Regional Development is currently edited by Professor Alistair Anderson

More articles in Entrepreneurship & Regional Development from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().