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The types of employability skills and how to infuse employability skills into education is increasingly clear in theory, but in practice, these are proving difficult for the higher education (HE) system in developing countries. A key question is why and how can HE system focus on graduate outcomes? It could be argued that the African debilitating unemployment crisis has been mainly because of the low levels of skills and low standard of education. Building on ‘postcolonial theory’, this chapter focuses on graduate outcomes to examine the current unemployment situation in Africa, causes and solutions to the challenges. By exploring issues related to over-reliance on outdated curriculum, poor teaching pedagogy, low government expenditure on education and ineffective education policies, we hope to contribute to the knowledge of ways to improve HE, labour force and sustainable development. This conceptual contribution argues that HE policies focus should be on skills development, vocational education, digital innovations and less emphasises on degree qualifications.

Entrepreneurship education is being taught to undergraduates in tertiary institutions and fresh graduates in youth programmes to encourage start-ups and create employment as a strategy to stem youth unemployment. As such, entrepreneurship education programmes are expected to include rigorous processes of programme design, implementation and evaluation so as to achieve changes in behaviour, attitude and action of participants measureable in terms of start-up and jobs created. Two entrepreneurship education programmes implemented in Nigeria are evaluated to ascertain the level of effectiveness in design, implementation and evaluation and the outcomes in terms of start-ups and employment created. Research methods adopted in the two programmes combine observation techniques with content analyses, action research in case study and focus group interviews. In addition, test-retest techniques in a quasi-experimental design, with a structured questionnaire is adopted in programme number two only. The findings are that while it is suspected that the design stage is jumped in programme number one, in programme two, the design is poorly done. Implementation is ineffective in the two programmes because objectives did not arise from programme design as they ought to and evaluation methods are inappropriate and so ineffective. The recommendations include review of the design of the two programmes to generate appropriate and measurable objectives; adopting implementation strategies that will achieve the measurable objectives generated from revised programme designs and adopting appropriate evaluation techniques that has capacity to measure outcomes and impact in addition to outputs.

Agriculture and related businesses in Ghana for the past decades have been the preserve for the smallholder, aged and illiterate farmers. Meanwhile, hundreds of students graduate in Agricultural Sciences from the universities over the years. This study seeks to investigate potential determinants of the entrepreneurial spirit of agricultural students to do self-employed businesses in the agricultural sector. A survey of 165 undergraduate students of agriculture in the University of Cape Coast, Ghana was undertaken to examine factors that influence their decision to enter into agribusiness as a self-employment venture after graduation. The results show that the majority of the students were males (87%) and approximately, 67% were willing to enter into agribusiness after school. The factors that students perceived to be hindrance to entering into agribusiness was the market competition of agro-products with imported products, unstable prices of agro-products, absence of insurance policy for agribusiness and unfavourable land tenure arrangement in Ghana. Correlation analysis showed negative and significant relationship between students’ willingness to enter agribusiness as a self-employment venture and the following personal characteristics: (1) level of education of mother, (2) level of education of guardian other than parents, (3) students who live in farming communities and (4) students who undertake farming activities at home. There were also positive and significant relationships between students’ willingness to enter agribusiness and the following: (1) availability of market for agro-products, (2) accessibility of market for agro-products and (3) accessibility of transportation facilities for agribusiness. Regression analysis showed that (1) level of education of mother, (2) students living in farming communities, (3) accessibility of transportation facilities for agribusiness and (4) accessibility of market for agro-product were the factors that best predict undergraduate agricultural students’ willingness to enter into agribusiness as a self-employment venture after graduation. To motivate students to take agribusiness as self-employment after graduation, the study suggests the development of comprehensive and sustainable long-term policy to inspire and attract the youth into agribusiness; creation of conducive environment to minimise risk and constraints associated with agribusiness in Ghana.

Advanced education is often thought to respond to the demands of the economy, market forces create new occupations, and then universities respond with new degrees and curricula aimed at training future workers with specific new skills. Presented here is comparative research on an underappreciated, yet growing, concurrent alternative process: universities, with their global growth in numbers and enrollments, in concert with expanding research capacity, create and privilege knowledge and skills, legitimate new degrees that then become monetized and even required in private and public sectors of economies. A process referred to as academization of occupations has far-reaching implications for understanding the transformation of capitalism, new dimensions of social inequality, and resulting stratification among occupations. Academization is also eclipsing the more limited professionalization processes in occupations. Additionally, it fuels further expansion of advanced education and contributes to a new culture of work in the 21st century. Commissioned detailed German and US case studies of the university origins and influence on workplace consequences of seven selected occupations and associated knowledge, skills, and degrees investigate the academization process. And to demonstrate how universal this could become, the cases contrast the more open and less-restrictive education and occupation system in the US with the centralized and state-controlled education system in Germany. With expected variation, both economies and their occupational systems show evidence of robust academization. Importantly too is evidence of academic transformations of understandings about approaches to job tasks and use of authoritative knowledge in occupational activities.

This chapter commences by depicting the rise of Africa as a force on the world map as a contextual background for a survey of the education expansion and reform project on the continent in the past 65 years – arguably the biggest education expansion drive in human history. The main lines of the education expansion and education reform in Africa are reconstructed. Education in Africa is then assessed in terms of three dimensions: quantitative, qualitative, and equalization. While being nothing short of spectacular, the education project in Africa faces severe challenges, on all three fronts of the quantitative expansion, quality, and equality dimensions. At the same time, as the African continent is embracing the world of the twenty-first century, this changed world is also adding its share of imperatives to education. Finally, the role of comparative international scholarship in negotiating these imperatives and challenges is noted.

This chapter offers a survey of education development in Sub-Saharan Africa, dynamics of global forces and Sub-Saharan African context. First, the regional context of Sub-Saharan Africa is surveyed. This is followed first by an overview of the incoming tide of global forces impinging on education in the sub-continent, followed by a discussion of education developments in Sub-Saharan Africa as co-shaped by contextual contours. It transpires that the contextual realities of sub-Sahara Africa not only have a powerful mediating role on the impact of global forces but also are in their own right an agency in shaping the education response of societies in the region. The other common thread running through the chapter is the lack of knowledge explicating the interrelationship between education and societal context in the region. This lacunus is evident from the fact that no country in the region has ever been included in international surveys such as the TALIS survey, to lack of research on, for example, informal settlements or the informal economy and its intersection with education. Such research, when placed on the Comparative and International Education research agenda, will not only be of significance to Sub-Sahara Africa, but also to the entire world, many aspects of the contextual architecture of the region are becoming increasingly evident world-wide.

This chapter presents a case of the adoption of the Bologna Process (BP) outside the boundaries of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) – in Cameroon. The adoption of the BP lines of action has triggered higher education (HE) reforms in Cameroon including reforms to enhance graduate employability. In Cameroon, graduate employability is promoted through ‘professionalisation’ of degree programmes – which seeks to prepare students with employment-ready skills and competences capable of adapting to the fast and highly competitive global economy either as job seekers or job creators. With the use of policy documents, existing literature and interviews with policymakers and university officials, this chapter examines the framing of employability from the perspective of social justice and neoliberal discourses. The analysis highlights the idea that while the overall goal is to promote social justice by enhancing the employability skills of all graduates to gain employment through a diverse set of employability pathways, some of the pathways are dominated by neoliberal ideologists discussed in this chapter via mode of governance, commodifying training and commodifying access. The different focuses and operationalisation of social justice and neoliberalism reveal tension as social justice emphasises training for all while neoliberalism emphasises training only for those students with the purchasing power.

This chapter offers some introductory concepts about entrepreneurship education (EE), including definitions, objectives, impacts on unemployment, and key approaches and challenges in implementing it in Higher Education institutions. It concludes by presenting entrepreneurial intention models apt to understand the pedagogical purpose of EE.