Strategies to Alleviate Poverty Among the Seventh-day Adventist Youth Through Education in the East Cameroon Mission

Abstract

The average Adventist youth in the East Cameroon Region is faced with too much poverty. This situation constitutes a serious predicament to the development of the church in this part of the world. It is an open secret that the authorities of the land have forgotten the region. The region is actually endowed with forests, mineral resources and the like, yet nothing is done to cater for the populations living in this area. The purpose of this project was to lay down strategies that, if implemented, may yield some dividends and alleviate the crunch of poverty on the young people in our churches. If we go by the old adage that says the youth of today is the church of tomorrow, it becomes imperative that strong measures be taken at the level of the mission to see to it that young people be engaged in activities that will move them away from the quagmire of poverty, and by so doing prepare the youth to be equal to the task to provide the churches with strong families where parents can afford to nurture, educate their offspring, and perpetuate the Church in our region. The writer believes that if nothing is done on these lines, youth will continue to be exposed to all kinds of social ills such as prostitution, drug addiction, or crime. On the other hand, the implementation of these strategies could serve as a template to other youth societies in other regions in Cameroon and beyond. The study analysed the impact of education on poverty reduction in Belabo and Ndelele cities by extracting data through questionnaires and analysing them by the method of descriptive statistics in Chapters 3 and 4.