Iro-idoro, Charlotte Bose & Jimoh, Tajudeen Adisa

One of the key issues bothering on socio-economic growth of developing nations is youth unemployment and underemployment. Despite the series of efforts by governments at different levels to salvage the situation, unemployment rate keeps increasing with noticeably frustrating trend of joblessness and poor motivation of young people to embrace agripreneurship among other options. Research evidences on the importance of agricultural sector in alleviating standard of living and national earnings give credence to the need for embracing agripreneurship development as a model for driving youth aspiration toward agriculture and agro-services, and to facilitate productive engagement and self-reliance among youths. The study is descriptive in design and the population comprised final year students of selected tertiary institutions in Ogun State from which 300 were selected using multistage sampling technique. A 4-point likert scale questionnaire with descriptive parameters was used and data collected were analysed with descriptive statistics involving frequency count, percentage, mean and standard deviation. The results indicated low response patterns in favour of students’ orientation and aspiration for agripreneurship and a moderately high inclination for conventional entrepreneurship options. It was concluded that the promotion of agriprenuership orientation and aspiration among students, especially at tertiary level is essentially critical in motivating the participation of youth undergraduates in agriculture and agro-services. This paper calls for deliberate and dedicated efforts by management of tertiary institutions towards inculcating agripreneurship aspiration among their students and towards providing or securing supports to interesting students or group of students. Keywords: Agripreneurship, Agriprenuership aspiration, Self-reliance orientation, Undergraduates 0150