Entrepreneurship Education and Teacher Training

Context and Issue

Implementation of any new curriculum requires comprehensive teacher training. Rwanda introduced an entrepreneurship curriculum to set interactive pedagogy and enhance business skills for secondary school-level students. To increase the effectiveness of the reform, teacher training was designed so that the teachers were well-equipped to teach entrepreneurship using interactive mediums of instruction.

Solution

The intervention was designed based on three key components:

The training covered pedagogical strategies for implementing an entrepreneurship curriculum. The training focused on planning, engaging students in classroom discussions, encouraging students to create entrepreneurship “portfolios” of their work, and harnessing the student business clubs to form and grow. At the end of the training, there was a “mock day” in which teachers rehearsed upcoming lessons.  The trainer was based on the cascading model of training the trainers. Moreover, government trainers were involved in the sessions.

Exchange visits: teachers participating in the intervention visited each other’s schools to learn from and provide feedback to their peers.

Outreach and support: teachers received ongoing outreach to support their curriculum implementation.

Impact

As part of the results based on the 207 secondary schools, the students in the treatment group increased their participation in businesses by 5 percentage points, or 17% of the control mean, with a decrease in wage employment and no effect on overall income. The findings from the evaluation study suggests substituting entrepreneurship and employment among students in treated schools.