Entrepreneurship Development Institutes (EDIs) are institutions that promote entrepreneurship by developing competencies to create and manage sustainable enterprises. But at the same time, empirical evidence supporting how entrepreneurship development training enhances entrepreneurial competencies and ultimately impacts business performance and enterprise sustainability is scarce in the context of Rural Development and Self-Employment Training Institutes (RUDSETIs). This study investigates how RUDSETI training programmes help build the entrepreneurial competencies of programme beneficiaries and assesses both the outcome in terms of business performance, as well as enterprise sustainability. A quantitative research approach was taken using a structured questionnaire on 380 RUDSETI beneficiaries. The proposed relationships were analysed using descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, correlation analysis, and structural equation modelling. The results indicate that there is a significant relationship between entrepreneurship development training on entrepreneurial competencies, and that it helps in business performance, further making an enterprise sustainable. The study also continues that competency–based Entrepreneurship Development Programmes are more useful when supplemented by experiential learning, mentoring and post-training institutional support. This has important implications for the design of entrepreneurship development institutions, policymakers, financial institutions and trainers as it illustrates that entrepreneurship education programmes should be competency-oriented. This study makes a contribution to the body of knowledge in entrepreneurship literature by its integration of Human Capital Theory and Resource-Based View with both aspects in relation to their effects on various relationships, focusing on the main antecedents like entrepreneurship development training, which ultimately cascades down to entrepreneurial competencies, business performance, and enterprise sustainability that will underlie a holistic framework for establishing sustainable entrepreneurial development...