Awareness, Motivation, and Youth Engagement in Social Entrepreneurship: An Ecosystem-Contingent Model and Evidence

Youth unemployment and underemployment in Ghana, a West African nation, have intensified interest in social entrepreneurship as a pathway to youth-led job creation and community problem-solving. This study examines how awareness and motivation shape young people’s engagement in social entrepreneurship; whether perceived barriers condition these relationships; whether access to resources mediates the motivation–engagement link; and whether engagement drivers differ across demographic groups. Adopting a pragmatic orientation with post-positivist logic, the study combined an explanatory, cross-sectional survey of 1,000 youth across all sixteen administrative regions of Ghana with a supplementary two-case comparison of youth-led social enterprises. Ordinary least squares regression indicated that awareness predicted motivation and engagement, and that motivation predicted engagement. Perceived barriers significantly conditioned the awareness–engagement and motivation–engagement relationships. Bootstrapped mediation did not support an indirect effect through access to resources. Awareness and motivation differed by gender and age, but not by education, employment status, or region. The cases suggested that ecosystem conditions serve as conversion infrastructure, determining whether readiness translates into sustained action, thereby repositioning youth social entrepreneurship as an ecosystem-contingent process and informing decentralized, friction-reducing support.