Comparative Analysis of Students’ Perceived Agripreneurship Competencies and Likelihood to become Agripreneurs depending on Learning Approach: A Report from Uganda

Abstract

Ensuring food security for a growing populace amidst an aging farmer population together with a decline in youth engagement in agriculture remains a global challenge. This is more distressing for developing countries, such as Uganda, that rely on subsistence farming to meet their food production demands, including job-creation for at least 75% of their populations. Therefore, the need exists to interest young people to lead innovative enterprises as agripreneurs to overcome poverty, food insecurity, and youth unemployment. A quasi-experimental, nonequivalent control group design was used in this study. The findings indicate that a statistically significant (p < .01) main effect existed between groups for perceived agripreneurship competencies depending on the instructional approach. Students in the treatment group had higher adjusted marginal mean scores for perceived agripreneurship competencies than members of the counterfactual group, which implied they benefited from a project-based learning approach. However, because the females had lower agripreneurial intentions than males regardless of group, additional research is needed on how to engage and inspire females to pursue agripreneurial ventures, i.e., increase their intentions, if doing such would improve the individuals’ economic livelihoods.