The church and poverty alleviation in Nigeria

Abstract

The apparent disconnection between Nigeria’s endowment in natural resources and the level of poverty has become a cause for concern, with a serious impact on the development of the nation. To address the poverty issue, the Nigerian government has designed various programmes. Drawing data from official documents and other relevant materials, this article examines such poverty eradication programmes. The article argues that as laudable as they appear, these policies and programmes have failed because of corruption and poor design and implementation, among others. This calls for other stakeholders to be involved in eradicating poverty in Nigeria. This article thus looks at what the Catholic Church is doing to reduce poverty for peace and sustainable development in Nigeria. It suggests that collaborative governance is the key to poverty eradication, peace and sustainable development in Nigeria. The descriptive phenomenological method was employed in the study.