The Orderly Entrepreneur, Youth Education, and Governance in Rwanda, by Catherine A. Honeyman, University of Stanford Press, Stanford, CA, 2016, 301 pp., £22.99

There has been a great deal of excitement internationally about the potentialities of teaching entrepreneurship in schools which policymakers believe could be both economically and socially transformative. In 2008 the Rwandan Government introduced a strategy to deliver entrepreneurship education into schools and this book is an ethnographic analysis of its imposition. The author claims that the book is less about the relative success or impact of this strategy and more about the unpredictable social complexities of policy imposition. However for me, the book is actually about both of these things as they are inherently interrelated. The success of the strategy is derived not only from the efficacy of policy implementation but also its sociocultural fit with Rwanda’s population. Following on from the well-documented problems in the country, the President was keen to instill [what he perceives] an enterprising path of self-reliance on the country. Therefore the book is really a story of how, or how not, to impose these values on a population. More broadly however, as we follow Honeyman on her anthropological adventure, we begin to evaluate the broader question “is the pursuit of such a policy worthwhile at all?”