Graduate entrepreneurship in Tanzania: Contextual enablers and hindrances (original) (raw)

In Tanzania, despite efforts in teaching entrepreneurship at universities, recent tracer-studies have reported falling rates of graduate self-employment. Among the factors that contribute to this decline, the Tanzanian entrepreneurial environment plays an ambivalent role. Based on the concept of entrepreneurial embeddedness, the personal stories of ten Tanzanian graduate entrepreneurs are content-analyzed. The results suggest that embeddedness in the social environment is not of a singular but of a mixed nature. Tanzanian graduate entrepreneurs operate in a developing environment characterized by complex, partly converging and partly conflicting contextual forces, which simultaneously advance and impede entrepreneurial activities. On the one hand, the changed political climate, strong family ties, emerging links with countries like China, and improved banking and taxation systems are among the factors conducive to graduate entrepreneurship in Tanzania. On the other hand, however, th...