Kinshasa adolescents facing entrepreneurial culture: Knowledge, practices and perspectives

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is an essential driver economic and social development, particularly in developing countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Despite the growing interest in this field, the entrepreneurial culture of adolescents remains largely underexplored in the Congolese context, even though adolescence represents a crucial period in the formation of career aspirations and professional projects. This study therefore aims to examine the situation of adolescents in Kinshasa with regard to entrepreneurial culture. The study adopts a quantitative approach based on a sample of 400 adolescents enrolled in 20 schools across the city of Kinshasa; The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, complemented by Firth’s penalized binary logistic regression. The findings reveal that only 11 % of the surveyed adolescents reported having knowledge of entrepreneurship, whereas 61 % were already engaged in commercial activities. This discrepancy highlights a limited formal understanding of entrepreneurship despite the relatively high participation of adolescents in income-generating activities. Finally, the econometric analysis shows that age, school grade, the source through which entrepreneurship was learned about, and engagement in commercial activities were not significantly associated with knowledge of entrepreneurship. The overall model also demonstrated very limited explanatory power (Cox-Snell R2=0.006; p=0.629).

Classification JEL : L26, O16, J24

Article Type : empirical research