That gap now has an official name. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s 2025/2026 Global Report calls it the Survival Gap: record levels of startup activity worldwide, and too few of those startups ever transitioning into established firms. GEM names two constraints behind it. One is access to financing. The other is entrepreneurial education.
The financing half of that diagnosis gets conferences, funds, government programmes and headlines. The education half gets almost nothing. It is also the half that is cheapest to fix.
What the GEM 2025/2026 Global Report actually measured
The scale of the dataset matters here, because it is what makes the finding hard to dismiss as a local complaint. GEM 2025/2026 draws on more than 160,000 individual interviews across 53 economies, covering roughly 43% of the world’s population and about 57% of global GDP.
Alongside the population survey, GEM scores each economy against 13 Entrepreneurial Framework Conditions: finance, government policy, taxes and bureaucracy, government programmes, R&D transfer, commercial infrastructure, market dynamics, physical infrastructure, social and cultural norms, and entrepreneurial education at two stages, school and post-school.
The result that should be uncomfortable for anyone working in education: entrepreneurial education at school is the lowest-scoring of all 13 framework conditions in 33 of 53 economies. Not weak. Not “room for improvement.” Last place, in roughly six out of ten countries surveyed.
Only four economies - India, Lithuania, Saudi Arabia and the UAE - reach sufficiency across all 13 conditions. The UAE has now led the National Entrepreneurship Context Index for the fifth consecutive year.
This is not a new pattern, which is the part that should sting. When GEM examined the same condition in its 2021/2022 cycle, 39 of 50 economies rated school-stage entrepreneurship education as their weakest condition. Only Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Qatar and the UAE cleared a score of 5.0 out of 10. Germany scored 2.83. France 2.89. Japan 2.13. Poland 1.73. Four years and one cycle later, the shape of the finding has barely moved.
Meanwhile the demand side keeps growing. In 33 of 48 economies, adults aged 18 to 34 are now more likely to start a business than those aged 35 to 64. In Germany, Cyprus and Slovenia young adults are roughly twice as likely to be engaged in early-stage entrepreneurial activity. More than half of new entrepreneurs in Germany and the UK are under 35.
More young people are starting. The educational condition that should prepare them is rated worst in the system.
What founders need at month 18 that no pitch competition teaches
Here is the mechanism that turns an education gap into a survival gap.
Almost every structured support format in the ecosystem is built around the first ninety days: idea development, canvas work, a pitch, a demo day, sometimes a first grant. That is the moment when help is most visible and easiest to organise. It is not the moment when ventures die.
Ventures die somewhere around month twelve to month thirty. That is when the founder is dealing with a completely different problem set: pricing that turned out to be too low to survive on, customers who bought once and never came back, a co-founder relationship that no longer works, a hiring decision made in a hurry, cash that runs out three weeks before the invoice clears, and the constant question of what not to build next.
Look at the German data on where things get hard, and the picture is consistent. In the KfW-Gründungsmonitor 2026, bureaucracy is the most-cited obstacle at 64% - but difficulty acquiring customers has surged to 57%, and concerns about profitability sit at 53%. Those are not launch problems. Those are operating problems.
GEM adds a second layer: fear of failure deters at least two in five adults who have already recognised a good business opportunity. Prior business experience raises the likelihood that someone starts. In other words, exposure to the real mechanics of running something is itself a formation factor, not only a survival factor.
None of these things are taught by a pitch deck module. They are taught by contact with reality, repeated often enough to build judgement.
A programme designed around survival rather than formation looks different in concrete ways. It runs longer than one semester. It brings participants back at month six and month twelve rather than releasing them at demo day. It teaches pricing as a decision with consequences rather than as a slide. It treats retention, cash discipline, and the ability to say no as core curriculum rather than as advanced topics. And it uses operators who have run something past its first crisis, not only investors who have evaluated one from the outside.
We are very good at helping people start. We have almost no infrastructure for helping them continue. Until that changes, the Survival Gap is a curriculum problem wearing a finance costume.
