Skills Acquisition in Snail Farming: A Panacea for Entrepreneurship Development of Graduate Youths in Rivers State, Nigeria.

The study which adopted descriptive survey design has a population of 800 graduate youths (male and female) from three local government areas in Rivers State. Accidental sampling technique was used to select 400 youths from the population as the study sample. Two research questions and two hypotheses formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance guided the study. The instrument for data collection was the researcher’s self-constructed 20-item questionnaire titled “Skills Acquisition in Snail Farming for Entrepreneurship Development Questionnaire (SASFEDQ)”. SASFEDQ was constructed on a 5-point Likert Scale of Strongly Agree, Agree, Undecided, Disagree and Strongly Disagree corresponding to numerical values of 5,4,3,2 and 1 respectively. The instrument was face validated by three experts in Vocational Agricultural Education from the University of Uyo, Nigeria. The reliability of the instrument was established via Cronbach’s alpha method with a reliability coefficient of 0.83. Mean and standard deviation were used to analyze the research questions while t-test was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed among others that hatchability skills, skills in pen construction, skills in snail feed preparation, accounting skills, strategic planning skills, communication skills are some of the vocational and business management skills required by graduate youths in Rivers State for their entrepreneurship development in snail farming. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended among others that Government should provide more vocational centers across the state for easy accessibility to vocational education and training. Keywords: Entrepreneurship development, snail farming, vocational skills, graduate youths. DOI : 10.7176/JEP/10-33-15 Publication date: November 30 th 2019