Demystifying Education Public-Private Partnerships: What Every Policymaker Should Know

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Global Governance and the Neoliberal Capitalist Order

Proposal

Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) articulates the ambition that all learners should complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education. Even with global attention firmly on this goal, progress is painfully slow. Sub-Saharan Africa remains 100 years off-track for girls, extreme inequity and widespread exclusion in education continue, and millions of children fail to learn the basics, increasing concerns about a “global learning crisis” (Winthrop & McGivney, 2015). Addressing these issues requires substantial investments to improve quality and expand access to higher levels of education, all while ensuring systems become more equitable and inclusive. This paper also addresses equity issues in the digital divide within the CIES 2025 theme.

Unfortunately, as UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report (GEM) (2023) estimates, the world has an average annual financing gap of USD 97 billion per year for low- and lower-middle-income countries to reach their national SDG4 targets. One-sixth of the poorest countries in the world are spending more paying back debt to wealthy nations and investors than they spend on children’s education (Save, 2022). A growing number of international actors are turning and encouraging governments to turn to the private sector to fill this spending gap, relieve the burden from, and/or help ‘fix’ failing public school systems. Powerful development actors like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and other donors have supported this privatization push as a solution to meeting unmet demand and for addressing education quality challenges. This pro-privatization narrative is gaining traction when governments are struggling to scale up quality education.

However, education is a fundamental human right, defined as the “process of developing and training the powers and capabilities of human beings” (Borgohain, 2016:71). As one of the essential rights, the adequate enjoyment of education is a precondition for the realization of numerous other human rights. As a public good, education produces a range of positive externalities, such as contributing to equity in society, serving as a tool of social transformation, and playing an essential role in nation-building. Importantly, ensuring the right to education is one of the core responsibilities of the State, so important that it demands freedom from conflicting commercial interests. According to human rights law, States bear the primary responsibility for education, as explained in The Abidjan Principles on the human rights obligations of States (2019) to provide public education and to regulate private involvement in education, which compile and unpack existing international legal frameworks on the right to education.

Policymakers find themselves at the forefront of navigating these conflicting approaches between the financial and political pressure to partner with private actors and delivering on the state’s responsibility to provide high quality public education. Accordingly, this paper critically examines the performance of one prominent manifestation of the trend toward privatization—the growth of Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) in education. This paper aims to provide policymakers with insights to facilitate informed decision-making regarding their approach to education provision by disaggregating the myths about PPPs from the reality of their implementation.

Based on the policymaker roles outlined above, this paper considers three important scenarios. Specifically, the marketing around PPPs often does not match the reality, so this text explains these distinctions in some detail. The first scenario pertains to policymakers considering entering into a PPP by critically examining major arguments made by PPPs’ proponents. The second section offers strategies to policymakers to mitigate harm in contexts with problematic education PPPs. The final scenario explores alternatives to PPPs, relevant to both groups of policymakers. Discussion within each scenario cites multiple levels of evidence from different countries and regions.

The first scenario addresses the question of “what rationales for PPPs do policymakers encounter?” by examining five main arguments, followed by presenting the policy realities. Argument #1 is that PPPs are more efficient and save scarce government resources, while reality #1 is that PPPs have misaligned incentives, cut corners to bring down costs, and risk creating long-term liabilities. Argument #2 is that PPPs can reach geographies and students that the state cannot, while reality #2 is PPPs harm educational equity and exacerbate inequality. Argument #3 is that PPPs are innovative and can address the learning crisis while reality #3 is that PPPs don’t necessarily deliver better results, but they neglect the most critical determinants of quality and discourage pedagogic innovation. Argument #4 is that PPPs are rapidly scalable while reality #4 is that the quest for rapid scaling creates multiple problems for the education system. Finally, argument #5 is that PPPs reflect citizen choice and offer ample space for accountability, while reality #5 is that PPPs may be a trojan horse for privatization and introducing “choice” fails to improve accountability.

Section 2 examines the experiences of the implementation of PPPs and identifies pitfalls related to their design. In particular, we address and refute five claims that PPPs: 1. Address the impact on equity: screening, selecting students, and cream-skimming; 2. Keep costs down without cutting corners; 3. Address weak accountability; 4. Ensure Transparency; 5. Address Power Asymmetries. Section 3 then addresses what should be done instead of PPPs, offering recommendations for governments and donors about how education policymakers should focus efforts on delivering high quality, free public education in accordance with international human rights law.

Authors

• Frank Adamson, California State University, Sacramento

• Anjela Taneja, Oxfam International

• Maha Shoaib, International Education Policy Department, University of Maryland, College Park