Building entrepreneurial literacy among villagers in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This article presents findings from interviews with Indonesian villagers who limited access to quality education. To minimise this educational disadvantage, a village community of entrepreneurship was designed to help improve villagers’ socio-economic capitals and empower villagers to become entrepreneurs. An exploratory study of this intervention programme was enacted to identify whether this village community of entrepreneurship helped build villagers’ entrepreneurial literacy. Findings showed the village community of entrepreneurship provided villagers with a space for learning entrepreneurship, and the villagers had informal educational opportunities. The villagers also reported that their heightened awareness of entrepreneurship could build their entrepreneurial literacy. It was also found that the programme improved the welfare of rural communities. The article concludes by recommending how this model may be adapted and adopted for rural communities worldwide seeking to create learning communities to improve literacy and reduce poverty.

KEYWORDS:

• Communities of practice
• education inequality
• entrepreneurship
• literacy practices
• rural education
• rural welfare

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the voluntary research participants for their active involvement in the entire research process and programmes and the involved parties from Universitas Negeri Jakarta and Pusat Kegiatan Belajar Masyarakat. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their detailed feedback, Professor Handoyo Puji Widodo for editing and proofreading early drafts and the journal Editor for substantial editing of the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).