STEP: Taking the step towards self-employment
2022-03-07 The Entrepreneurship Research Project supports young people in the Global South on their way to owning their own business.
Youth unemployment in Africa is dramatic: "About one in two cannot find a job - despite good education," says Dr. Michael Gielnik, Professor of Human Resources, especially Human Resources Development. For more than ten years, he and Dr. Michael Frese, Professor of Psychology, in particular Innovation and Entrepreneurship, have been supporting young people in the global South on their way to self-employment. STEP stands for Student Training for Entrepreneurial Promotion and is a joint transdisciplinary research project of Leuphana University Lüneburg and several partner universities in East and West Africa. More than 20 universities and vocational schools have now offered the twelve-week entrepreneurship training program, and around 11,000 young people have completed the program: "STEP is perhaps also so successful because we don't want to export Western knowledge to the Global South, but work together with local educational institutions. After a three-year establishment phase, STEP is implemented independently by local actors. The local partners receive all the necessary materials and tools for this," explains Michael Gielnik.
STEP training is unique because it is action-oriented and evidence-based. During STEP training, participants create a microenterprise to learn entrepreneurship on-the-job. One participant, for example, set up a bakery and later employed seven staff. "By connecting to practice, the founders learn to trust their abilities and gain practical experience," says Michael Gielnik. The training is evaluated regularly using a randomized control group design: "The number of start-ups increased by 34 percent as a result of STEP and 40 percent more jobs were created than by the group that did not participate in the training," the researcher reports.
The entrepreneurship program is also offered in the Philippines and Mexico, in addition to the African continent.