Literacy is seen as antecedent of poverty. This paper has assumed that literacy has a direct influence on poverty level. Poverty is the lack of income necessary to ensure access to a set of basic needs while literacy is the ability to read and write. This paper aims at investigating the extent to which selected poverty related variables correlate with literacy related variables and the pattern of such correlation. The poverty levels was categorized into poverty by expenditure, household size, per capita expenditure while literacy levels was categorized into years of formal education, educational age group. These variables were analyzed using the multivariate analysis technique known as the canonical correlation analysis, first described by Hotelling (1935), which is used in a wide range of disciplines to analyze the relationships between several independent and several dependent variables. Statistica software package was employed in running the analysis. The results reveal that there is a significant positive correlation between the levels of poverty and literacy. In addition, some of the levels of literacy had a significant correlation with that of poverty levels when correlation matrix was employed. The results show that literacy is one of the strong factors that determine poverty
