A Review of public private partnerships around girls' education in developing countries: flicking gender equality on and off

Abstract

The article reviews the literature on Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and policy on girls’ schooling in developing countries. It considers the ways in which aims around gender equality and women's rights are positioned in policy texts concerned with girls’ education PPPs. The argument made is that these documents exemplify an oscillation, using a multipolar register, between pragmatic initiatives that recognise existing sites of power, and attempts to develop a political project that dissolves differences between public and private constituencies, who share an interest in getting girls into school. The potential and limits of this approach to support integrated policy around rights and equalities is considered using the case of DFID's Girls’ Education Challenge. An analytical framework is sketched that maps a political and epistemological process termed dispersal, which is used to consider some ways to investigate the effects of PPPs as a mechanism to address intersecting inequalities.

Education, decolonisation and international development at the Institute of Education (London): a historical analysis

“…She established an academic career, which became increasingly mainstream. Areas of her interest in gender and inequality have been personally linked with concerns for political and economic change, although she has written about the ways in which these ideas and the groups that promote them are always at risk of co-optation and disorientation (Unterhalter, 2017(Unterhalter, , 2022.…”

USAID: Investing in Primary Education for the Sustainable Development of Pakistan

“…This project has sustained student enrollment rates in primary, middle and secondary schools in seven districts of Sindh and Karachi. The program successfully constructed 106 schools and improved 70,000 early grade student reading skills (Unterhalter, 2017). ESRA project by USAID provided grant of US$ 427,350 in order to provide professional development to 100 lead teachers, 1000 primary teachers and 45 learning coordinators in Lasbela and Loralai districts of Baluchistan (Husnain and Ali, 2010).…”

Beyond typologies

“…PPPs are promoted through a vast array of tools and by a wide range of institutions, including bilateral donor agencies, United Nations' agencies, such as UNICEF, WHO and UNECE, the Group of 20, the World Bank Group, global accounting firms, the World Economic Forum, and philanthropic organisations. And PPP promotion proceeds apace despite ambiguous (and often negative) evidence regarding effectiveness, cost and equity implications (Trebilcock and Rosenstock, 2015;Hall, 2015;Romero, 2015;KS et al, 2016;Gideon and Unterhalter, 2017;Languille, 2017;Unterhalter, 2017).…”