Nature, nurture … or neither? Are entrepreneurs born or made?
For Kgabo Mokgohloa, of Unisa’s Graduate School of Business Leadership (SBL), the answer lies somewhere in between. “Entrepreneurship is neither entirely inherent nor entirely teachable,” he says, describing it as a developable leadership capability shaped by personality, education, environment and experience, rather than an inborn trait possessed by a select few.
Because entrepreneurship is not innate, early education can play a formative role in its development. Long before anyone mentions cash flow or business models, many children get their first taste of entrepreneurship at a school market day. Entrepreneurship education is already taught as part of economic and management sciences under the department of basic education’s curriculum, alongside the economy and financial literacy.
Fellow SBL academic Motsamai Molefe says: “The earliest and most durable entrepreneurial capacities are behavioural rather than financial,” referring to problem-solving, delayed gratification, collaboration and becoming comfortable with getting something wrong. These can be developed through play, simple trading exercises and group projects well before concepts like margin or cash flow make any sense to a child.
Mokgohloa agrees that the emphasis for younger children should be on curiosity, creativity, initiative and responsible risk-taking rather than on simply making money. As learners mature, the focus should progressively shift from “starting a business” to “creating value” — recognising problems, imagining solutions and acting on them.
Wits Business School MBA programme director Jenika Gobind says: “I’d like to see something here like they have in the US, where children run lemonade stands. We need to develop a culture of entrepreneurial spirit at an earlier age. This should start at primary school and continue all the way through the educational journey.”
Compliance over curiosity
The authors of the 2026 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) special report, Bridging The Gap: Realising South Africa’s Entrepreneurial Potential, agree. They write: “School-level entrepreneurship education lays the groundwork for the mindset, curiosity and problem-solving behaviours that later become essential in post-school settings. Introducing entrepreneurship concepts at the school level helps young people begin developing creativity, resilience and awareness of opportunities long before they enter the labour market. Early exposure enables learners to understand that entrepreneurship is not merely about starting a business but about thinking differently, identifying problems, designing solutions and developing confidence in their abilities.”
As things stand, says the GEM report, the curriculum actively discourages such ideas: “When South African schools reward compliance over curiosity, exam scores over experimentation and job-seeking over job creation, they are not simply failing to teach entrepreneurship. They are actively cultivating the opposite disposition. Post-school programmes then inherit the task of undoing what a decade of schooling has reinforced.”
Kairoon Fyzoo of the Management College of Southern Africa School of Business Excellence says young learners do not need to begin with company law or complicated business plans. Identifying a simple problem, developing a solution and explaining why somebody might value it is already useful entrepreneurial education.
Even basic ideas such as the difference between a need and a want, or between the cost of making something and the price charged for it, can be introduced early.
“Entrepreneurship should not become another subject dominated by terminology and memorisation,” she says. “A classroom market or community problem-solving project may teach children more about customers, cost and value than a page of definitions.”
Milpark Business School academic and entrepreneur Seraj Toefy argues that such experiences need more structure. School market days already give children a taste of selling something, but he says they are “seldom backed up or linked to some form of foundational knowledge of business”. One option is to pair them with a simplified “business model canvas” — a tool to visualise, design and create a business model.
Mentoring could matter just as much. Toefy points out that children from poorer communities may not have business owners among their family or friends to turn to for advice. Linking small businesses with experienced mentors could help bridge that gap.
Getting in early
The case for starting early inevitably runs into South Africa’s jobs crisis. The official unemployment rate rose to 33.6% in the second quarter of 2026, and for many young people, entrepreneurship is increasingly presented not as one possible career path but as the alternative when employment cannot be found.
Early business education can make an important contribution, but it cannot resolve structural unemployment on its own, argues Fyzoo. Entrepreneurship should not be presented as a convenient solution to unemployment. “Doing so risks shifting responsibility for a structural problem onto young people.”
Morris Mthombeni, dean of the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science, also warns against the “seductive claim” that a short course or pitch competition will automatically produce job creators. Business schools can develop commercial awareness, confidence and practical skills, but finance, networks, market access and family circumstances still shape whether a young person can turn an idea into a viable business.
That’s why entrepreneurship should be introduced before young people run out of other options, he says. Too many first encounter it as a desperate response to unemployment. “By then it is framed as survival, not as a credible career pathway requiring preparation, knowledge, networks and disciplined execution.”
Entrepreneurship education, in other words, can widen the options available to young people. It cannot carry responsibility for fixing the economy that they enter. Nor should that be the only reason for teaching it.
Mthombeni argues that learners need entrepreneur role models whose lives resemble their own — from townships, rural areas and ordinary families — rather than celebrity founders and global tech billionaires. Relatable role models, he says, can show not only that entrepreneurship is possible but also demonstrate the uncertainty and persistence behind the success story.
Ultimately, the goal is not to turn every child into a business owner. “The wider educational purpose is to help every learner become more resourceful, adaptable and capable of creating value as an entrepreneur, employee, professional or community leader,” he says.
Molefe believes embedding ubuntu principles in entrepreneurship education can help young people understand that “enterprise can serve family and community, not only individual ambition”.
That, he says, can produce ventures that are more rooted and collaborative from the beginning, particularly in a country where social cohesion itself is an economic asset worth protecting.
