Business Education: A Tool for Poverty Alleviation in Enugu State

Abstract

The study was carried out to determine the ways Business Education can contribute towards poverty alleviation in Enugu State. Two research questions and two null hypotheses guided the study. The study adopted a descriptive research design that made use of 24 item structured questionnaire. The population for the study comprised 93 lecturers comprising 46 university lecturers and 47 polytechnics/colleges of education lecturers. The questionnaire was face validated by three experts. Split-half reliability method was used to determine the reliability of the items and a coefficient of 0.85 was obtained. The questionnaire was administered on 93 respondents by the researchers with the help of two research assistants. The entire 93 copies of the questionnaire were returned. The data collected were analysed using mean, standard deviation and the hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The findings were that business education provides good citizenship through preparing students to become intelligent and productive wage-earners, and also train people to acquire skills and knowledge for employment in business related occupations, and help individuals to set up small scale businesses which can alleviate poverty. Based on the findings, it was recommended among others that Federal Government of Nigeria should set up monitoring agency to track implementation processes of the various poverty alleviation programmes it has introduced.