Efforts have been made to promote entrepreneurship, particularly for employment and job creation. Despite the efforts, people have not gone into business in the numbers expected. A significant proportion of the businesses also fail or do not mature as anticipated, while many remain the living dead– businesses that crawl along with limited benefits. 

Among others causes of people not going into business is lack of clear understanding of exactly what entrepreneurship is and hence how best to promote it, the attitude towards self-employment and how entrepreneurship is taught. Different people define entrepreneurship differently., and self-employment is often viewed as an option for those who cannot get into their preferred salaried careers. Parents and the community, therefore mostly favour youths to pursue salaried employment regarded to have higher job security and status. Many youths also do not recognise the role entrepreneurship courses are intended to play in their career choice and do not view them as any different from maths, history or biology, just courses in which to get a good grade at the end of the term or semester.

There is besides a difference between teaching about entrepreneurship and teaching entrepreneurs. Teaching about produces people who know a lot about entrepreneurship, but still seek salaried employment. Teaching entrepreneurs produces people who create businesses. The common lecture-based method amounts largely to teaching about entrepreneurship,