CfE@VU is involved in entrepreneurship research and education in Southeast African countries (mainly Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia). The main activities are supervision of PhDs and training of university lecturers. Students from the joint MSc Entrepreneurship also participate in these projects, with fieldwork for their MSc thesis.
PhDs
- Albogast Kilangi
Dissertation: The Determinants of ICT Adoption and Usage among SMEs: The Case of the Tourism Sector in Tanzania - Nsubilii Isaga
Dissertation: Entrepreneurship and the growth of SMEs in the furniture industry in Tanzania - Ernest Mwasalwiba
Dissertation: University Entrepreneurship Education in Tanzania: Teaching Context, Students Profiles, Expectations and Outcomes - Emiel Eijdenberg
Dissertation: Small business growth in East African Least Developed Countries: Unravelling the role of the small business owners - Shiferaw Muleta
Dissertation: Entrepreneurial behaviour and firm performance of Ethiopian tour operators - Progress Choongo
Determinants of sustainable entrepreneurship practices in small and medium firms in Zambia - Mwansa Chabala
Determinants of growth of small and medium enterprises in Zambia - Kimeu Muindi
Entrepreneurial development and poverty alleviation: Sustainable livelihood strategies adopted by women entrepreneurs in Western and South Eastern Kenya - Gorah Abdallah
Factors motivating entrepreneurs from informal small business to shift to formal small business: A case study of Tanzania
See also more detailed biographies of some of our PhD students.
Training of university lecturers
Internet-based Entrepreneurship at University of Iringa (Tanzania)
The full name of this project was ‘Empowering gender-based food security entrepreneurship: An internet-driven course module’. This project, that was run in 2016, was commissioned by NUFFIC (the Netherlands organization for international cooperation in higher education), provided by the VU Centre for International Cooperation and requested by the University of Iringa (Tanzania).
The project consisted of two connected workshops. The first workshop (July 2016) was provided by the VU Centre for International Cooperation and dealt with the training of various internet skills and tools for educational and professional purposes in general. The second workshop (November 2016) was provided by Enno Masurel (CfE@VU) and Emiel Eijdenberg (University of Hohenheim, Germany), in which a group of 15 entrepreneurship lecturers from the University of Iringa participated. The focus during this second workshop was specifically on the use of internet in modern entrepreneurship education. Next to introduction to scientific journals in the field of entrepreneurship, also questionnaires were derived from study of papers in these journals, a fieldwork among small businesses in Iringa region was organized, the gathered data were analyzed and the results from this data analysis were compared with the predominantly western studies in these journal. As a finishing touch of this workshop, the participating lecturers developed a course manual on a specific entrepreneurship course each, in which the use of internet was crucial.
Internet-based Entrepreneurship Education at Mzumbe University (Tanzania)
This project will take place in 2017. Further information will follow soon.