Alleviation of poverty through improved literacy curriculum

Abstract

Poverty alleviation has been a major point of discourse among scholars. It is one of the Sustainable Development Goals for the Millennium, the United Nations Organization listed it as number one of the millennium development goals to be achieved by 2015. Unfortunately, rather than achieving the goal, many African countries sunk deeper into poverty, chief among such countries is Nigeria. Many measures have been deployed to combat the scourge to no avail. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to examine how improved literacy curriculum could alleviate poverty in Nigeria. The paper examined what literacy curriculum connotes, its basic components and how improvement could be brought into literacy curriculum to alleviate poverty in Nigeria. The researcher while searching through research findings and secondary authors discovered that improved literacy curriculum should be more of practice than theory (functional literacy) and should also reach a wider percentage of the total population by way of extending literacy curriculum to embrace market women, farmers, artisans and apprentices. The literacy should deal with how people can actually use the 3Rs and other essential skills and competences to solve personal and societal problems and should enable individuals in the society to achieve their goals, develop their knowledge and potentials to participate fully in the society. Definitely, persons of such calibers cannot be categorized as poor. Therefore, it is recommended that literacy curriculum be improved to include more practice than theory and to embrace larger percentage of the society.