Exploring the Implemented co-curricular Activities and how they Revitalize Entrepreneurial Skills to Primary Pupils in Mbeya City in Tanzania

Abstract

Primary education is a cornerstone and basic foundation for enhancing different skills and knowledge that expose children with opportunities and challenges within the society. This kind of education is implemented through core-curricular, co-curricular, extra-curricular and hidden curricular. While this is true, the majority of primary schools in Tanzania have discouraging performance in the implementation of co-curricular activities that enable pupils to be exposed in various entrepreneurship activities compared as to other countries. In raising the performance, Tanzania is now receiving a considerable attention through its policies to revitalize the implementation of co-curricular activities. In the effort to enhance success in the implementation of co-curricular activities to different primary schools, there is an intervention that currently the government is imposing to revisit the past mistake with an intention of comprehending what has made Tanzania to be where it is today. Thus, the purpose of this study is to assess the implementation of co-curricular activities and its reflection on enhancing entrepreneurial skills to primary pupils in Tanzania, particularly in Mbeya City. In achieving this study, the concurrent triangulation research design, and mixed research approach were employed which included 467 participants. The study was done in Mbeya City and involved 332 pupils, 125 primary school teachers, 8 heads of primary schools and 2 quality assurers. The findings indicate that majority of primary schools in Tanzania are implementing different co-curricular activities which relate to entrepreneurship and pupils gain the entrepreneurial skills and knowledge that are highly useful for them. However, the study findings show that majority of private primary schools had good system of enhancing entrepreneurial skills to primary school pupils as compared to public primary schools in Tanzania. Therefore, it is recommended that, school owners whether private or public primary schools should emphasize the implementation of co-curricular activities and accord them similar status with core-curricula programmes with an intention of developing pupil in cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains.