Management of Secondary Education for Poverty Alleviation: Implications for Sustainable Development in Nigeria

Abstract

The paper reviewed Management of Secondary Education for Poverty Alleviation in Nigeria. The concept of education was seen as a set of activities which entails transition of ideas, values, and norms of the society across generation. Furthermore, educational management was viewed as the theory and practice of the organization and administration of existing educational establishments and systems. It involves planning, organizing, staffing, controlling, directing, coordinating and budgeting. Also, the concept of poverty was seen as the lack of physical necessities, social inferiority, isolation, physical weakness, powerlessness, vulnerability and humiliation. Poverty alleviation was viewed as efforts, actions and programmes discretionally employed to end or reduce the incidence of poverty. Findings revealed that poverty in Nigeria is caused by: inadequate access to employment opportunities, inadequate physical assets, such as land, capital, and minimal access by the poor to credit even on a small scale, inadequate access to the means of supporting rural development in poor regions, inadequate access to markets where the poor can sell goods and services, low endowment of human capital, destruction of national resources leading to environment degradation and reduced productivity, inadequate access to assistance for those living at the margin, victimized by transitory poverty, and lack of participation and failure to draw the poor into the design of development programmes. Education strategies for poverty alleviation in Nigeria was viewed as government making simple, wellconceived and properly designed policies and programmes for poverty alleviation which should have a direct effect in the lives of the target group. It was concluded that secondary education in Nigeria has to be structurally managed with adequate financing. It was suggested amongst others that, government should provide free basic education for every child in the state through effective management of education.