Municipal Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Training and the Challenge of Ecosystem Value Creation: The Case Study of eThekwini Municipality in South Africa

This article examines municipal small, medium and micro-enterprise training programmes in South Africa through the lens of ecosystem value creation, with specific attention to entrepreneurial individuals, environments and processes. Despite sustained public investment in training-based interventions, enterprise failure rates remain high, raising questions about the capacity of such programmes to generate sustainable entrepreneurial entities. Drawing on the theory of planned behaviour, the study adopts a mixed-methods case study of eThekwini Municipality, combining survey data from trained entrepreneurs, interviews with municipal officials and documentary analysis. The findings indicate that training programmes are effective in strengthening entrepreneurial intention, particularly by enhancing attitudes towards entrepreneurship and perceived behavioural control. However, these gains do not consistently translate into sustainable enterprise activity due to fragmented institutional environments and weak post-training processes. The study demonstrates that while municipal training interventions successfully develop entrepreneurial individuals, misalignment between entrepreneurial environments and processes constrains ecosystem value creation. By highlighting the intention–sustainability gap within a municipal context, the article contributes to entrepreneurship scholarship in emerging economies and underscores the need to reframe the development of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) away from isolated training interventions toward integrated ecosystem support. The findings further indicate that bridging the gap between entrepreneurial intention and enterprise sustainability requires stronger institutional coordination and structured post-training support mechanisms. Integrating municipal training initiatives with mentorship, finance access and market linkages may enable more coherent entrepreneurial ecosystems capable of supporting sustainable MSME development and long-term local economic value creation.