Incubating an Entrepreneurial Mind Through Student Skills Empowerment Programme at Kwame Nkrumah University in Zambia

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is highlight Kwame Nkrumah University's student Empowerment programme (SEP) whose core business is to empower students to improve their lives and the lives of others while on campus and after they have left the university. The program was initiated by three lecturers after a realisation that there has been a shrinking space for employment in the teaching fraternity in the country. Kwame Nkrumah university predominantly trains teachers who are taken on by the government which has not been able to employ all the graduates of late. As such, graduate teachers have been left to wander the streets without anything meaningful to do. This is because their training does not expose them to survival skills in an event that jobs are not available after graduation. Due to a huge backlog of unemployed teacher graduates, there is no hope that our students would be employed soon. The nature of training directs them to job-seeking as opposed to self-employment. The empowerment aspect seems to be the missing link that the SEP has come to address especially at Kwame Nkrumah University through a number of activities. To address the gap identified, three clubs outside the normal academic calendar were introduced namely, Art Club, Student Research Club, and French Club. In these clubs, students are exposed to hands-on activities such as music and dance, interpretation, Research mentorship activities, and many other skills development activities. The clubs, through various activities, are critical in shaping the students to be change agents by gaining the skills to impact their own lives and lives of other individuals, organisations, and communities once they are out of the university instead of waiting to be employed by the government. Various career programmes are conducted through in-house workshops and the programme has proved to be a success story.