Entrepreneurship education from Pre-colonial to Post-independent Nigeria

Department of Educational Foundations, Faculty of Education, University of Port Harcourt. *Corresponding Author’s Email: majesse4live@yahoo.com The basic goal of any nation is the economic empowerment of the citizens. To this effect, education has long been recognised as potent tool for the actualisation of national goals. The economic crunch across the globe in the last centuries has led to the evolvement of various strategies to solving the problems. The increased emphasis on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education is a most popular approach. This paper focuses particularly on the history of entrepreneurship education in Nigeria from pre-colonial era to post-independence. The study closely examined African traditional education and its entrepreneurial nature with the state of economy in that period. It also probed into the colonial era and when western education was introduced, and posits that the vacuum in entrepreneurship education is responsible for the present educational problems in Nigeria. The work also looked into the various programmes of government to improve entrepreneurship education through skill-oriented learning and education for self reliance with suggestions on how to improve entrepreneurship education in Nigeria.