Culture shapes whether Tanzanian graduates dare to start their own businesses

In Tanzania, a university degree has long been imagined as a ticket to a salaried government job, and new research suggests that this cultural script is quietly deciding which graduates dare to start businesses of their own. A study published in SN Social Sciences by Suleiman Rashidi Mpuhu, Gennes Henry Shirima and Moshi Amsi Mislay of the University of Dar es Salaam examined how culture, norms and social expectations shape the entrepreneurial intentions of university graduates and how those intentions interact with entrepreneurship education. Drawing on interviews with 30 academic staff members and 30 graduates from the University of Dar es Salaam and Mzumbe University, the researchers found that culture does not merely sit in the background of entrepreneurial decision-making. It actively reaches into the psychological machinery that determines whether a graduate forms the intention to become self-employed at all.

To organize their analysis, the team used the Theory of Planned Behaviour, a widely applied framework in psychology developed by Icek Ajzen. The theory holds that behaviour is predicted by intention, and that intention is shaped by three constructs: attitude, meaning the personal evaluation of the behaviour as good or bad; subjective norm, meaning the perceived social pressure to perform or not perform the behaviour; and perceived behavioural control, meaning the individual’s sense of how easy or difficult the behaviour would be. In the Tanzanian context, the researchers found that culture influences all three. Graduates who saw entrepreneurship as a legitimate, respectable path developed more positive attitudes toward it, while those raised to prize formal employment viewed business ownership with suspicion. The perceived approval or disapproval of family and community operated as subjective norms, and the visibility of successful or failed entrepreneurs in a graduate’s social world shaped their sense of whether they could actually succeed.

The study used a multiple case study design, gathering data through semi-structured interviews that were then analysed thematically, following the well-established qualitative approach of Braun and Clarke. This method allowed the researchers to identify recurring patterns across the accounts of academics and graduates rather than testing predetermined statistical hypotheses. The choice of two universities, one large public institution and one smaller regional one, gave the team a comparative window into how entrepreneurial culture is transmitted inside higher education and how graduates experience that culture once they leave campus. The researchers report that the interviews revealed a striking tension: entrepreneurship is taught in classrooms as a route to personal independence, yet the social world graduates return to often treats it as a last resort for people who could not find real jobs.

Among the most powerful barriers the researchers identified were strong social expectations favouring formal employment, direct family pressure, and the stigma attached to business failure. Graduates described how parents who had invested heavily in their education expected a return in the form of a secure salary, and how choosing self-employment could be read as a betrayal of that investment. The fear of failing at business carried a social cost beyond the financial loss, echoing international research showing that stigma around failure shapes entrepreneurs’ career choices. In a cultural environment where a failed venture marks a person in the eyes of neighbours and relatives, the psychological price of trying can outweigh the appeal of potential success, suppressing the perceived behavioural control that the Theory of Planned Behaviour identifies as essential to intention formation.

Yet the study’s most nuanced finding is that culture is not simply an obstacle. The researchers found that cultural resources can become powerful tools for entrepreneurial success when used strategically. Social networks, trust within communities, and collective support systems all emerged as assets that entrepreneurs could mobilize to find customers, secure credit, gather market information, and weather difficult periods. In settings where formal financial institutions are difficult to access, these informal cultural mechanisms function as a parallel infrastructure of enterprise. A graduate who understands how to activate family connections, community trust and cooperative labour can convert cultural capital into commercial advantage. The same cultural fabric that pressures graduates toward salaried work can, in other words, provide the relational scaffolding that makes self-employment viable.

This dual character leads the researchers to a significant theoretical conclusion: the sociocultural context both restricts and facilitates entrepreneurial behaviour among graduates. Culture, they argue, is an important variable that conditions the relationship between entrepreneurship education and self-employment outcomes. This matters because a substantial body of international evidence shows that entrepreneurship education can strengthen entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions, but the Tanzanian findings suggest that classroom instruction cannot operate in a cultural vacuum. If a graduate leaves a course inspired to start a business but returns to a family and community that treat entrepreneurship as failure by another name, the educational intervention may be neutralized. The researchers suggest that entrepreneurship education must therefore be culturally responsive, engaging directly with the norms and expectations students carry with them rather than assuming a neutral social environment.

The practical implications extend beyond the lecture hall. The study recommends that universities embed culturally responsive content in their entrepreneurship curricula, using local examples, acknowledging the real social pressures graduates face, and teaching students how to mobilize positive cultural resources such as networks and community trust. For policy makers, the researchers propose public awareness initiatives designed to normalize entrepreneurship as a legitimate career trajectory, comparable in social standing to formal employment. Such campaigns would aim to shift the subjective norms that the Theory of Planned Behaviour identifies as central to intention, gradually reframing business ownership in the public imagination. For graduates themselves, the study advises strategic use of positive cultural resources while actively managing or overcoming negative social expectations, a balancing act that the researchers present as a realistic description of entrepreneurial life in Tanzania rather than an idealized one.

The findings arrive at a moment when graduate unemployment is a pressing concern across sub-Saharan Africa, where formal labour markets absorb only a fraction of the young people entering them each year, and where self-employment is often discussed by governments and development agencies as a necessary component of economic strategy. International organizations have documented the scale of the youth employment challenge globally, and scholars of African entrepreneurship have repeatedly noted that entrepreneurial dynamics on the continent cannot be understood apart from their institutional and cultural settings. The Tanzanian study contributes to this conversation by providing fine-grained qualitative evidence of exactly how culture enters the intention-forming process, connecting macro-level employment statistics to the micro-level decisions of individual graduates weighing family approval against business ambition.

Methodologically, the study’s reliance on thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews means its conclusions are interpretive rather than statistical, and the researchers are transparent that the interview transcripts supporting the findings are held by the corresponding author rather than released publicly, out of respect for participant privacy, though access can be granted for verification under agreed ethical standards. The team reports no external funding and no competing interests. The qualitative design is well suited to the research question, since the mechanisms by which cultural expectations shape attitudes and perceived control are precisely the kind of phenomena that emerge through open-ended conversation rather than closed survey items. The researchers also note that their framework builds on prior Tanzanian work testing the Theory of Planned Behaviour among university students, positioning their contribution as an extension of a growing national research agenda on graduate self-employment.

Ultimately, the study reframes a problem often treated as purely economic as a problem of culture and psychology intertwined. If Tanzania and comparable economies hope to convert rising numbers of graduates into engines of sustainable development, the researchers argue, the intervention points are clear: education systems that speak the cultural language of their students, public narratives that dignify entrepreneurship, and graduates equipped to harness the networks and trust their communities already offer. Culture, the findings suggest, will decide the fate of graduate enterprise one way or the other. The question is whether institutions will work with that cultural force or continue to leave it unexamined, allowing social expectation to quietly veto the ambitions that classrooms work so hard to inspire.

Subject of Research: When culture hinders enterprise: cultural influences on graduate self-employment intentions and entrepreneurship education in Tanzania

Article Title: When culture hinders enterprise: cultural influences on graduate self-employment intentions and entrepreneurship education in Tanzania

Article References: Mpuhu, S. R., Shirima, G. H., & Mislay, M. A. (2026). When culture hinders enterprise: cultural influences on graduate self-employment intentions and entrepreneurship education in Tanzania. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 356. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01643-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01643-x

Keywords: culture, hinders, enterprise, cultural, influences, graduate, self-employment, intentions, entrepreneurship, education, Tanzania, scientific research