The Ugandan government has prioritised entrepreneurship as a key driver of economic development, yet the efficacy of business education in cultivating entrepreneurial competencies remains inadequately understood. Current policy lacks a cohesive diagnostic tool to evaluate the alignment between pedagogical practices in tertiary institutions and national entrepreneurial objectives. This article develops and applies a novel diagnostic framework to analyse the Ugandan business education ecosystem. Its objective is to assess the extent to which current pedagogy and policy are coherently structured to foster graduate entrepreneurship and identify critical gaps. The analysis employs a qualitative policy document review and a structured diagnostic framework. This framework evaluates four interconnected dimensions: curriculum design, pedagogical delivery, assessment strategies, and ecosystem linkages, against stated national policy goals for entrepreneurship development. The application reveals a significant misalignment: over 70% of reviewed curricula emphasise theoretical knowledge transmission over experiential, practice-based learning. Pedagogy remains predominantly lecture-based, with limited integration of real-world business planning or venture creation. Ecosystem linkages with industry and incubators are weak and inconsistent across institutions. The business education ecosystem is not optimally configured to produce practice-ready entrepreneurs. While policy rhetoric supports entrepreneurship, pedagogical implementation and institutional partnerships have not evolved to meet these strategic aims, creating a systemic gap between education outcomes and labour market needs. Policymakers should mandate the integration of compulsory, credit-bearing venture creation modules. A national fund should be established to incentivise university-industry partnerships for student entrepreneurship projects. Educator training programmes must be reformed to build capacity in experiential teaching methodologies. Entrepreneurship education, policy analysis, diagnostic framework, business curriculum, pedagogical alignment, Uganda This article provides a novel diagnostic framework for systematically evaluating the coherence between entrepreneurship pedagogy and national policy, offering a replicable model for similar analyses in other developing economies.
Mubiru et al. (Wed,) studied this question.