Poverty in its full meaning and implication is the inability of the individual or group to adequately access the very things that essentially support daily living including food, water, health and other key necessities of life that makes for both productivity and sustenance. The simplest meaning of this is that poverty is total lack of the capacity to generate the resources or materials that sustains daily living both for the individual and the group, and also confers dignity on human life by giving the individual access to minimum decent living. This means that ones the individual is empowered with the capacity for productive, dignifying and decent living, then poverty has been definitely eliminated or considerably alleviated.
Again, poverty is the inability to break the chain of dependence either by individual or group due to the absence of the capacity to take care of ones challenges or attain self reliance. These are the very features that characterize the regions of the world where the greater number of the poor and underprivileged population is clearly identified. They either depend on the government, development partners and charity groups to take care of their challenges. This is due to the fact that they have not been empowered to generate possible solutions to their daily life challenges including hunger and disease. At this point, applying the key of education as a channel of empowerment is not only the best option, but the most strategic and workable option to reduce or alleviate poverty. This is where the concept of educational charity comes in as the best option in charity and intervention models and instruments.
The role of educational charity is to explore the curriculum for productive education and skilled knowledge to empower the poor and the underprivileged in such a way that they are empowered to generate enough individual and collective capacity to live a productive and decent life.
The greatest empowerment for the human person for better living is the empowerment of the human mind. No other means could have been best to accomplish this than educating the mind and equipping it with the needed skills and knowledge that will help the individual to generate solutions to his or her problems. This is the greatest gift the poor can ever receive from the governments of the world, development partners and charity groups in their daily struggle to escape poverty, hunger and disease.