What Can Help Me Understand How Lack of Education Causes Poverty?

To understand how lack of education causes poverty, we can turn to recent research that highlights the direct correlation between the two. Here are several findings that help us to make the connection:

A 2021 paper from Stanford University and the University of Munich presents: “In simplest terms, long-term economic growth is largely determined by the skills of the population in each country. In turn, the relevant skills can be gauged by international assessments of mathematics and science achievement.”[1]

In other words, the flow of money in a country from the individual level to the country as a whole is shown to be directly tied to education, especially in math and science.

Oxfam International reports: “Good-quality education can be liberating for individuals, and it can act as a leveller and equalizer within society.” Further, “Social mobility, i.e., the possibility for children from poor families to end up better off than their parents, is intimately tied to the availability of education.”[2]

No matter how hard a person works, if they don’t have an education for higher-skilled jobs, they can never improve their situation.

The World Bank reports: “We have determined that 53 percent of children in low- and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple story by the end of primary school. In poor countries, the level is as high as 80 percent. Such high levels of illiteracy are an early warning sign that all global educational goals and other related sustainable development goals are in jeopardy.”[3]

This means that education is one of the foundational issues that must be solved before other problems can be tackled.

These organizations, and many others, consistently connect the dots between a lack of education and poverty. That is why ensuring quality education for all is one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.[4] It is a global acknowledgement that tackling access to education is an important enough task that the whole world should be concerned in helping to accomplish it.

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