The Impact of Foreign Aid on Poverty Reduction / Alleviation Programmes in Lagos State , Nigeria

Foreign aid is a concept that has taken centre stage since the past decades in world affairs. There have also been arguments whether or not foreign aids serve a useful purpose in poverty reduction/eradication in the developing nations. However, this paper believed that such facility should be utilized by the developing countries to improve upon the lives of their citizens. This paper, therefore, discusses the impact of foreign aid on poverty reduction, and or eradication programmes in Lagos State, Nigeria. It examined literature on foreign aids and poverty as well as the nature of foreign aid and its strategy for poverty reduction in Lagos State. It also investigated and analysed, how foreign aid has impacted poverty eradication/ reduction programmes in Lagos State. The methodology for the study is exploratory that made use of both primary and secondary sources of data collection. The primary sources of data were collected through interview and government document; while the secondary data were collected from textbooks, library search, scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles and internet. The data collected were content analysed. The paper found out that there are serious challenges militating against the effective use of foreign aid on poverty alleviation programmes, amongst which are; misappropriation of funds, and lack of statistics on who should benefit from the programme. The paper recommended that the government should strengthen the institutional framework to ensure adequate monitoring and deployment of training centres to accommodate more people who are willing, to effectively monitor the sessions, among others.