Encouraging Entrepreneurship Education and Development in Jaffna District

Abstract

Entrepreneurship contributes to the economy of a community in many ways. For the society and communities, entrepreneurship provides the means for achieving the level of diversity, innovation and independent decision-making required for the survival, development and freedom. Entrepreneurship education is becoming a component of new economic strategies for fostering job creation. The outcome of entrepreneurship education is emergence of a new generation of entrepreneurs who create jobs not only for themselves, but also for others. Jaffna is part of Sri Lanka which is highly affected by war for the last twenty years. The one and the only environment opened for youngsters is educational environment. After finishing their education they expect job opportunities from the government. This suggests that there is an urgent and growing need to develop more indigenous enterprises primarily to provide more employment opportunities for the young people. The present study was conducted taking randomly selected 100 graduates and 100 dropout students in Advance Level classes to examine to what extent they have an idea to start a new business rather than searching a job in the government sector. Data were collected through a structured questionnaire and were analysed simple ratio analysis. The findings indicate that the problem youngsters who live in Jaffna face is unemployment. So, increased efforts and support to foster entrepreneurship education and development are certainly important solutions to help overcome this problem.