Education and the Challenge of Poverty Alleviation in Nigeria

Using Vector Autoregressive and Autoregressive Distributed Lag methods to examine the impact of education on poverty level and the interactive effect of education and economic growth on poverty level in Nigeria between 1985 and 2016, our results show that education promotes poverty level, instead of reducing it. We found significant cointegrating relationship among poverty, economic growth, education, employment rate, population growth rate, real physical capital formation, education level and real GDP. In the short-run, employment rate reduces poverty level, population growth rate increases poverty level both in the short and long-run. The results of interactive effect of economic growth and education on poverty growth show that jointly economic growth and education reduce poverty, although the results are not statistically significant. This shows that they have minimal impact on poverty level in Nigeria. Our findings may not be surprising, given the current slow-down in Nigeria educational system and the wide gap between the few rich and the larger poor. The study suggests improvement in Nigeria educational system so as promote employment and curb rising poverty level.