Youth Entrepreneurial Readiness in Jordan: High Interest, Low Success Rates
Key Messages of the article
• Young people in Jordan have positive attitudes towards entrepreneurship (48 per cent reported that they wanted to start their own business or project within five years).
• Young people often reported, however, that they did not know what entrepreneurship is. Those who did know focused on entrepreneurship in terms of small or home-based projects.
• Finance and credit were, by far, the biggest perceived barriers to entrepreneurship.
• Ten per cent of young people had an idea for a business and tried to start a business.
• Half of young people (51 per cent) who tried to start a business failed to get their enterprise up and running.
• Among young people who did start a business, 85 per cent had their business fail and 6 per cent closed their business. Only 9 per cent of young people who started businesses managed to continue them.
• Young people who engaged in skills trainings, courses, apprenticeships, and internships found that these programmes fostered their personal development but rarely helped them to start a business.
• Policies and programmes promoting youth entrepreneurship as the solution to youth unemployment should re-think their approach, given the substantial challenges and high failure rates for youth enterprises.
• Rather than focusing on turning unemployed young people into new entrepreneurs, policies and programmes should help those potential entrepreneurs whose businesses are most likely to succeed – who are likely to be older adults with experience. This would help to start more long-term businesses and thus create jobs for young people.