Education Privatization across Geographies: the Global Level, East Africa, and Francophone Countries

• In Event: Realizing the Abidjan Principles on the Right to Education: Human Rights, Public Education, and the Role of Private Actors in Education

Proposal

Understanding about the growth of private actors in education and the increase in education privatization as a global phenomenon varies by region. This analysis combines three areas of work, a global analysis of the spread of education privatization and in-depth analysis in East Africa and Francophone countries about the rise and implications of private actors and privatization in education. The first area of work sets the stage using data from the OECD and UNESCO to create a composite global heatmap of education privatization based on both funding and enrollment. The second area of analysis draws on a book chapter on the role of private actors in East Africa written by Linda Oduor-Noah. Finally, drawing on a chapter by Marie France-Lange, the evolution of privatization in Francophone countries, a under-researched group, is analyzed and compared with the other two sets of findings.

The chapter on East Africa addresses trends and key challenges related to the growth of private actors in primary and secondary education, specifically focusing on Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Rwanda and South Sudan. East Africa, in particular, has been at the forefront of education privatisation in recent years with various modalities of private involvement, including the unregulated expansion of commercial school chains. Oduor-Noah identifies several key factors driving the growth of private actors, including barriers to public investment in education, perceived declines to quality of public education, national policy orientation, weak regulatory policy environs, and donor influence. The impact of this growth on the right to education mirrors the international evidence presented by Verger et al. and de Koning in this panel – mixed and inconclusive results for outcomes accompanied by issues of widening stratification and equity, revealing a questionable value for money of LFPS. Oduor-Noah (forthcoming) concludes by noting the public sector challenges and “cyclical nature to the policy mistakes … in the haphazard rolling out of education reforms” leading to increased private actor involvement while recommending increased attention to evidence and regulation of private actor involvement as a policy remedy.”

In examining the under-researched phenomenon of private actor involvement in Francophone countries, Marie-France Lange illustrates the complex political and cultural legacy of colonialism in French-speaking countries. She includes seventeen countries from Sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti, while omitting those no longer primarily using French, such as in Southeast Asia. Several important factors for the growth of education privatization include religious and linguistic differences between Muslim, Christian, and indigenous groups, differences between French and Belgian colonial legacies, and differences between stable and fragile states (due to poverty, conflict, etc.). Similar to findings from Oduor-Noah’s East African analysis, Lange (forthcoming) identifies that “the actual role of aid-dependent States is reduced due to loan and grant conditions” to multilateral institutions, as well as accommodation of international agendas. Within countries, Lange discusses a “choice” strategy, also discussed by Härmä and Dorsi in this panel, deployed by socioeconomically advantaged families to avoid public schools, increasing stratification and further disenfranchising schools with families who cannot afford different options, echoing the findings across this panel.

Author

• Frank M. Adamson, California State University, Sacramento