Abstract
This paper interrogates how entrepreneurship education (EE) policies address informal urban entrepreneurship in African contexts. It assesses their alignment with Sustainable Development Goal 8 (SDG 8) on decent work and inclusive growth. Although EE is widely promoted as a development tool for employment generation and enterprise creation (Acs et al., 2016; Audretsch & Belitski, 2021), policy architectures predominantly focus on formal enterprise paths. This orientation fails to adequately reflect the socially embedded, network-based, and livelihood-oriented nature of African informal economies (Abdulai & Hussain, 2023). This raises critical questions about whether current EE designs truly advance inclusive development.
Drawing on a PRISMA-guided systematic review of 171 peer-reviewed studies, the paper integrates descriptive profiling with a design-oriented Context–Intervention–Mechanism–Outcome (CIMO) synthesis (Denyer et al., 2008). Publication trends reveal greater scholarly attention since 2015. Most studies concentrate on developing-country settings and increasingly use quantitative evaluation designs. Interventions are mainly delivered through universities, vocational institutions, and state-supported programmes. They are typically assessed with venture-oriented indicators such as business registration, employment creation, and firm growth.
The configurational analysis reveals three main structural patterns. These are institutional dominance in delivery, limited incorporation of informal entrepreneurial realities, and a narrow measurement of SDG 8’s decent work dimensions. In contexts with livelihood precarity and dense social networks, standardised, classroom-centred interventions are paired with evaluation frameworks focused on formal market entry. These patterns show a structural formalisation bias. Informal entrepreneurship is implicitly seen as transitional rather than a sustainable economic system.
Addressing this misalignment requires system-level reconfiguration instead of small programme adjustments. This study proposes design strategies that see informal entrepreneurs as co-producers of learning. It suggests integrating education into community and market networks and expanding outcome metrics to include livelihood resilience and adaptive capacity aligned with SDG 8 (Sultana et al., 2022). By combining systematic evidence with configurational policy analysis, the study offers a framework to rethink entrepreneurship education as an inclusive development infrastructure within African urban economies.