Entrepreneurial Training, Orientation, Size, and Performance of Selected Government-funded Youth Groups Enterprises in Taita-taveta County, Kenya

Abstract

The study is about entrepreneurial training, orientation, size and performance of youth group enterprises that are funded by the government in Taita-Taveta, Kenya. The government, in its bid to reduce the soaring levels of unemployment among the youth, created and implemented the Youth Enterprise Development Fund. This fund provides finance and entrepreneurship training to youth and disadvantaged groups to enable them to start and run their enterprises. It, however, seems not to have delivered the expected impact. It is, therefore, pertinent to establish the effects of the entrepreneurial training and funds provided to the youth for enterprise development. The intention of this study was to establish the following with respect to youth group enterprises: effect of entrepreneurial training on organisational performance; the output of entrepreneurial orientation on the association between entrepreneurship training and organizational performance; the effect of the size of an organisation on the nexus between entrepreneurial training and organizational performance; and the joint effect of entrepreneurial training, orientation, and size on organizational performance. A survey design that was cross-sectional in nature was employed. Out of the 156 youth group enterprises that were targeted for data collection, 62 percent responded positively. Questionnaires that were personally administered by the researcher and research assistants were used to collect the data. Characterizing statistics, correlation, and regression analyses were then performed on the data. The study established that training in entrepreneurship has a significant effect on the performance of an organization; entrepreneurial orientation does have a significant mediating effect on the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and organizational performance; the size of an organization does also have a significant moderating effect on the relationship between entrepreneurship training and performance, and; entrepreneurial training, orientation, and size do have a significant joint effect on organizational performance. The results suggest that policymakers in the area of youth entrepreneurship should endeavor to make youth entrepreneurs become entrepreneurially oriented. It is recommended that financiers of youth enterprises be involved in entrepreneurship capacity enhancement programmes and skew them towards proactiveness, innovativeness, and risk-taking. There is also a need to put in place measures that enhance the size of youth group enterprises, for instance, their amalgamations. This study has added to the existing body knowledge by empirically confirming size, entrepreneurial training, and orientation theories. The study was mainly limited by the fact that it relied heavily on the memory of the respondents, which may have been negatively affected by the passage of time. Suggestions for further research include using the longitudinal research design and adding other variables into the equation that have the potential to affect performance.