Impact of education on rural poverty: a review of literature

Abstract

Rural poverty is a concept of deprivation of basic needs in the rural area which is a geographic area located outside cities and towns. In order to have a long-term solution to such a deprivation of needs in rural human being, education would be a sustainable strategy. Although for the last few decades, many subsidy programmes were introduced in order to alleviate rural poverty in Sri Lanka, still the rural sector in the country has poverty. However, there is a structural change in the rural sector due to either subsidies or free education system. Hence, the objective of this review is to explore how lack of education impacts as a barrier for expanding the horizons of income, consumption and standard of living in the rural sector in poverty as identified in the literature. Two hundred sixty nine (269) journal articles were referred in the last 20 years in order to grasp the real gravity of the problem of poverty in the light of education as a desk research. The objectives guiding the analysis of literature were to understand the relationship between education and poverty, identify the existing barriers in the field of rural education and the impact of the lack of resources in the rural sector to rural education, identify the impact of parental education to education of rural youth, discuss the relationship among education, human development and rural agricultural productivity and to observe the employability of rural youth due to education. This review is instigated by searching key academic databases using relevant search questions. The literature suggests that there is an inverse relationship between education level of the rural and the level of rural poverty.