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Entrepreneurship Education as an Antidote for Rehabilitating Street Beggars from Poverty Life to Self-Reliance Citizens in Lagos State, Nigeria

This study investigates relationship between entrepreneurship educations rehabilitating of street beggars from poverty life into self-reliant citizen in Lagos State, Nigeria. Street begging has become a persistent socio-economic problem in Lagos State due to harsh realities of poverty, unemployment, lack of vocational skill acquisition and poor social welfare support. The study anchored on Human Capital Theory. The targeted population of the study comprised all street beggars residing within 20 Local Government areas of Lagos State, Nigeria. Two research questions were raised and two null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. A sample of size of 200 street beggars were selected through accidental and disproportionate sampling techniques. Two research instruments titled ‘Entrepreneurship Education Questionnaire’ (EEQ) and ‘Street Begging Rehabilitation Questionnaire’ (SBRQ) were used for data collection. Content validity of the instruments was ensured by test experts and reliability consistency of the instruments was at 0.70 and 0.71 using Cronbach’s alpha. The Kendall’s tau-b correlation was used to analyse data collected via Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 26.0.  The findings of the hypotheses 1 and 2 showed that: a significant relationship existed between vocational skill acquisition program and street begging rehabilitation in Lagos State, Nigeria (τb = .581; N=200; p<0.05); and a significant relationship existed between financial empowerment initiative and street begging rehabilitation in Lagos State, Nigeria (τb = .592; N=200; p<0.05);Based on the findings, the study concluded that integration of vocational skill acquisition and financial empowerment initiative into rehabilitation programs enhances self-esteem, creativity, and income generation, thereby reducing the prevalence of street begging and urban poverty. Therefore, it is recommended amongst other that Policymaker should provide adequate funding to the established vocational and entrepreneurship training centres across local governments areas in Lagos State to provide continuous learning opportunities for rehabilitated beggars.