Paul Omandji is Head of Internal Audit at the Directorate General of Taxes of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In his role as professor, he has written a number of publications and also provides professional and academic training in public finance, auditing and entrepreneurship.
In September 2021, he defended his Executive Doctorate in Business Administration (Executive DBA) on the topic of ‘Entrepreneurial representations of recent graduates from Congolese universities: understanding through life stories’, under the supervision of Professor Christophe Schmitt, Vice President of the University of Lorraine.
Thesis Direction
Pr Christophe Schmitt
Thesis Title
Entrepreneurial representations of young Congolese university graduates: understanding through life stories
Abstract
Entrepreneurship for young graduates from universities remains one of the major concerns, particularly in the southern states, given the high unemployment rate and the lack of a social care framework. Institutional actions in his favor cannot be efficient without the scientific input of the universities, which are activists of economic and territorial development. In this area, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is characterized by a low density of small enterprises in the light of its population, mostly young, full of energies and initiatives but mainly oriented towards the informal sector dominated by survival or constrained entrepreneurship. This situation shows uncertainties both in the duration of these cases and in the creation of value.
Also, research verifies whether Congolese students are more enterprising than entrepreneurs and wants to understand the true image that the latter are making of entrepreneurship. The study of entrepreneurial representations of young Congolese graduates is based, inter alia, on the paradigms of the emergence of entrepreneurial representations in Bourion (2008), on the consistency between the mode of thought and the ability to act entrepreneurial in Filion (2008) and on the gaseous state of the entrepreneurship of Schmitt (2015), to contribute to the legitimization of theories that support the primacy of upstream entrepreneurship actions.
The research mobilizes the qualitative approach around the life stories recorded among young graduates as the main actors. It plans to identify the different profiles of the entrepreneurial representations of these actors and thus expects to contribute to the improvement of the entrepreneurial culture of young people through relevant managerial recommendations and to motivate effective and efficient support, institutional actions aimed at targeting the focus of action and supporting young people in their entrepreneurial process.