“India is a land of diversity -- of different castes, peoples, communities, languages, religions, and culture. Although these people enjoy complete political freedom, a vast part of the multitude is illiterate and lives below the poverty line. The single most powerful tool for the upliftment and progress of such diverse communities is education. The state, with its limited resources and slow-moving machinery, is unable to fully develop the genius of the Indian people…

(Private institutions’) grievance is that the necessary and unproductive load on their back in the form of governmental control, by way of rules and regulations, has thwarted the progress of quality education…
It is no secret that the examination results at all levels of unaided private schools, notwithstanding the stringent regulations of the governmental authorities, are far superior to the results of the government-maintained schools.”

--Supreme Court Ruling, Unni Krishnan of India, 31 October 2002

Governments across the world assume the obligation of education as a universal, publicly provided good. Every country in the world but two ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, declaring that “States’ Parties recognize the right of the child to education…they shall, in particular (a) make primary education compulsory and free to all…” In surveyed cities across the developing world, however, as many as 75% of students attend private schools, paying fees of less than US$10 a month. Given that countries across the world have declared an ambition to provide free and universal education, as a publicly provided good, why do low-income citizens in developing areas choose to pay a significant proportion of their income on schooling?

For anyone interested in education in emerging markets, the “Affordable Private School” market is too big to ignore. As the Indian Supreme Court acknowledges, in very poor countries, the state simply does not have the resources alone to develop an educated population.  Although the governments of every Indian state provide free education through age 14, in many Indian states over half of school-age children attend private schools (NCERT, India). I conducted a statistical survey of private school enrollment in every state in India, and I visited over 60 schools in Hyderabad and Mumbai. I found the same reasons for why families chose private schools: the government schools were simply not of good quality (teacher absence rates in government schools are significantly higher than in private schools). In some cases, government schools did not exist at all. In the slums of Mumbai, massive government housing compounds have been built to shelter a rapidly-growing population. I visited a housing compound of over 200,000 citizens on the outskirts of the city; within a one-hour walk, there was only enough classroom capacity in government schools for 2,000 students. As a fix to this problem, enterprising educationists run bootstrapped schools out of their government-subsidized apartments and also build separate buildings to reach an educational need.

This is a phenomenon that is not unique to India. In Pakistan, almost 70,000 affordable private schools exist, and in surveys from scholars such as Prachi Srivastava and James Tooley and organizations like the United Nations, we find enrollment of almost 60% in major cities from Ghana to Kenya to Indonesia to Madagascar.

The international development community sometimes has an anti-private aid bias: to those detractors, I say that affordable private schools are a necessary complement, not a replacement, for governments’ commitment to free, universal schooling.  Affordable private schools can help us reach ambitious global education goals. In Hyderabad, India, according to official government figures, students are falling behind Millennium Challenge Goals in school enrollment. When affordable private schools are included, Hyderabadi students are on track to reaching these ambitious goals. 

One major problem with the Affordable Private School sector: we don’t know enough. The schools are independent and often not formally organized, so we don’t know where they are unless we walk to find them, block by block, as I did in Hyderabad and Mumbai. We don’t have enrollment data or, more importantly, performance data, and we don’t have a great idea yet of how much better in quality affordable private schools are. They are clearly meeting a need—but we don’t know how best to support them. The Enterprising Schools website is an excellent platform to exchange knowledge, propose solutions, and turn talk into action.

Photo Credit: MEDA