In Low-fee Private Schooling and Poverty in Developing Countries (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), Joanna Härmä builds on 18 years of work and research in the field of low-fee private schooling in India as well as Africa to provide a detailed, probing analysis of the state of education in much of the developing world and the growing role of “philanthrocapitalists” to transform it through market-driven reforms.

Härmä, a visiting research fellow at the Centre for International Education at the University of Sussex, draws, in particular, on her time in a rural part of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where she did her doctoral research and has been living part of the year since 2002.

In this NCSPE excerpt from her book, Härmä describes the development of Education for All, an initiative through which UNESCO and other international advocacy organizations set their sights in the 1990s on getting all children in developing countries into school by 2030, and its contribution to the rise of low-fee private schooling. As a sample of her rigorous scholarship and deft analysis, this excerpt should entice readers to read the whole book.

While Härmä concedes that poor students in much of the developing world have been failed by government school systems hobbled by corruption and mismanagement, she views the entrance of the low-fee private sector intended to correct such state failure as far from sufficient: specifically, she faults these schools, one, for inadequate staffing and, two, for inaccessibility to families too poor to afford even low fees. 

Härmä traces the “mushrooming” of low-fee private schools to Education for All. With such concerted effort and urgency, Education for All dramatically increased enrollment in schools without providing the necessary financial support to properly equip them. Moreover, the spike in enrollment led to a demand for qualified teachers that could not be met. Such blinkered advocacy is precisely what Härmä warns against. And she ultimately attributes this advocacy to “the sowing of the seeds for private school growth.” With government schools incapable of satisfying demand, low-fee private schools stepped in.

As documented on this site in working papers by Prachi Srivastava in 2007, Francine Menashy in 2015, Tamo Chattopadhay and Maya Roy in 2017, and Steven J. Klees in 2017, low-fee private schooling in the developing world is a topic of growing significance. In providing on-the-ground reportage and synthesizing abundant academic research, Härmä makes this eminently clear.

Andrew Thomas
Research Associate, NCSPE
June 18, 2022