Informal Entrepreneurial Network Education as a Catalyst for Women’s Enterprises Sustainability: Evidence From Nigeria

Extant studies in the literature have found that informal entrepreneurship education has concentrated largely on technical skills and has continually ignored the current needs of informal entrepreneurs at the stage of entry and development performance of most informal enterprises. In spite of Africa informal sector that accounted for 85.5% informal enterprises in size than other continents, yet, it is worrisome that the sub-Saharan Africa contribution of informal sector to gross domestic product (GDP) between 2000 and 2010 has dropped from 63.6% to 55%, resulting to rising poverty rate, alarming youth unemployment rate, higher enterprises closure rate, and indeed, declining unstable enterprises. As such, this study empirically examines the impact of informal entrepreneurial network education on women’s enterprises sustainability in Nigeria, using NECA Women entrepreneurs association. To achieve this specific objective, the study decomposed informal entrepreneurial network into three networks, the NECA Women entrepreneurs association, the Government agencies association, and the social media platform and the average value represent the informal entrepreneurial network education to regress on the dependent variable, the women enterprises sustainability. A total of 100 questionnaires were distributed and administered via the google survey from the six-geopolitical regions in Nigeria. The study employed statistical packages for social sciences (SPSS) to estimate the research questions and the impact of informal entrepreneurial network education on women enterprises sustainability, using descriptive statistics and OLS regression respectively. The descriptive results found that of the three informal entrepreneurial networks, NECA women association exhibited a strong interactive (3.28 of 5.00 Likert scale) entrepreneurial network education than use of government agencies and social media platform that exhibited weak interactive (1.8 and 1.94 of 5.00 Likert scale) enterperneurial network education among informal entrepreneurs in Nigeria. In addition, OLS regression result found that all three informal entrepreneurial networks education has a 38.9% impact on women’s enterprises sustainability within the study periods of October and December, 2020 in Nigeria at 1% level of significance. Based on the results, the study concluded that NECA women entrepreneurial interactive network outperformed both government agencies and social media interactive networks and thus, the study recommends that the NECA women entrepreneurs should consolidate more than the economic perspective by extending to the remaining triple bottom line factors such as environmental and social factors as to meet both current needs and future generation needs of the enterprises stakeholders in this study.