EDUCATIONAL ENROLMENT AND POVERTY REDUCTION IN NIGERIA

ABSTRACT This study investigates the effect of educational enrollment on poverty reduction in Nigeria from 1980 to 2023, using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimation techniques. Key variables include GDP per capita (proxy for poverty), school enrolment (proxy for educational attainment), capital and recurrent expenditure on education, inflation, exchange rate, and life expectancy. Unit root tests and co-integration analysis were employed to examine the stationarity and long-run relationships of the variables. The ARDL results showed that educational attainment does not significantly influence poverty reduction in both the short and long run. However, exchange rate was found to significantly impact poverty, revealing a counterintuitive relationship: rising exchange rates led to higher per capita income, which did not align with expected poverty reduction trends, possibly due to inflationary pressures on households. The findings suggest that while investment in education is important, macroeconomic factors particularly exchange rate instability play a more immediate and significant role in poverty trends in Nigeria. The study recommends policies targeting exchange rate stabilization, as well as improved educational quality and access, especially for the most vulnerable populations.