The Role and Impact of Public-Private Partnerships in Education

International Experience
While governments remain the main financiers
of primary and secondary education,
a substantial share of education worldwide
is now delivered by private agents (Lewin
and Sayed 2005). Private enrollment has
increased faster than public enrollment
in recent years. Enrollment in private primary
education grew by 58 percent between
1991 and 2004 from 39 to 62 million, while
public enrollment grew by only 10 percent
from 484 to 530 million during the same
period (UNESCO 2007). Sub-Saharan
Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia are
the regions with the largest growth in the
private provision of education (UNESCO
2007).
To increase access and improve quality
in education, many governments are finding
it effective to separate the financing of
education from its provision (World Bank
2003a). Empirical evidence suggests that
education systems in which schools are
publicly funded but privately operated are
associated with better student performance
(Schütz, West, and Woessmann 2007). So
governments are exploring ways to involve
the private sector in providing education.
This chapter presents a global review of
public-private partnerships (PPPs) in primary
and secondary education, focusing
on partnerships in which governments use
contracts as instruments of accountability.
The underlying idea behind contracts is
that they introduce a performance-based
approach to education because they clearly
link funding and provision with education
outputs and they direct services to underserved
student populations, especially marginalized
groups such as low-income or
disadvantaged students.
In the most common type of PPP, governments
fund existing private schools,
mainly to increase access to education but
also to enhance quality by enabling poor
students to attend better private schools
and by introducing school competition to
promote efficiency. In more recent types of
PPPs, governments have contracted with
private providers to deliver a range of inputs
and services with the expectation that they
will introduce new pedagogical skills and
management efficiencies that the public
sector lacks, thus generating alternatives to
traditional forms of public education. As discussed
in the previous chapter, contracts for
education-related services can cover a range
of services and inputs including the private
management of public schools, subsidies
and vouchers, private finance initiatives for
school construction and maintenance, and
professional services such as teacher training,
curriculum design, and textbook provision.
The expansion of private participation
in the education systems of both developed
and developing countries is increasingly
turning them into markets with the potential
to develop innovative education methods.
In the following chapters, we discuss
examples of public-private partnerships
from around the world. These countries
and programs are described in more detail
in appendix A, which contains information
on 92 PPP programs and policies across 47
countries. The PPPs are organized by contract
type, as defined in chapter 1, and are
listed alphabetically by country within each
of these categories. The list is not exhaustive
but gives a representative picture of the
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variety and unknown geographical location of PPPs
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(c) The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank