Prachi Srivastava, Ph.D.
prachi.srivastava@uwo.ca
University of Western Ontario
Prachi Srivastava is tenured Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada in the area of education and international development. She is also Senior Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for International Education, University of Sussex; Adjunct Professor, Centre for Global Studies, Huron College; Adjunct Professor, School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford. Dr. Srivastava has held visiting academic appointments with Columbia University, University of Oxford, and the National University of Singapore. Before entering academia she served with the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, and also headed the first minority education integration programme for Roma and Ashkalia children in Kosovo for the International Rescue Committee. She has worked in India, Sri Lanka, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo.
Research Interests
Development
Public Policy
Foreign Aid
Global Education
Privatization
Countries of Interest
India
Canada
United Kingdom
My Research:
Dr. Srivastava has been researching issues related to the right to education and global development for nearly 20 years. She studies the equity implications of privatization and private sector activity in education in the Global South. She is recognized for her work on 'low-fee private' schooling for disadvantaged groups, coining the now generally accepted term, and asks the questions, 'What is the impact of accessing private schooling on poor families in poor countries? What is the State's responsibility to provide free and compulsory education for all? She also examines private investment in education, with a focus on global philanthropy and impact investment in Asia. Dr. Srivastava has been interviewed by and provided commentary in the press, new and social media, and radio, including The Economist, The Guardian, the CBC, Vrij Nederland, L'actualite, amongst others. Her work has been referenced in the various authoritative UNESCO Education for All Global Monitoring Reports and Global Education Monitoring Reports, and in the World Bank's 2018 World Development Report. She has attracted over $600 K in external research funding, and published and presented extensively. She has been invited as a guest lecturer for seminars in Yale, the University of Oxford, the National University of Singapore, among many others. Dr. Srivastava provided expertise to a number of government agencies and international organizations, including the European Commission, the UK's Department for International Development (DFID-UK and DFID-India), UNESCO, and the World Bank. She was invited to present evidence at Westminster for the British Parliament's All Party Parliamentary Group on Global Education for All.
We examine relative household costs and experiences of accessing private and government schooling under India’s Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 in the early implementation phase. The Act deems that no child should incur any fee, charges, or expenses in accessing schooling. Private schools are mandated to allocate 25% of their seats for free via ‘freeships’ for socially and economically disadvantaged children. Furthermore, the Act has a number of provisions attempting to ease barriers to admission and entry to all schools, including private schools. This paper reports household-level data on the schooling patterns, experiences, and perceptions in one Delhi slum accessing schooling based on a survey of 290 households and 40 semi-structured household interviews. We found very low instances of children with private school freeships. Furthermore, children in ‘free’ private school seats incurred the second highest costs of accessing schooling after full-fee-paying students in relatively high-fee private schools. Finally, households accessing freeships and higher-fee schools experienced considerable barriers to securing a seat and admission.
This article argues that the rise of domestic and international philanthropic engagement in education in India cannot be understood in isolation; rather, it is part of a broader trend of what is termed ‘new global philanthropy in education’ in the Global South. Central to understanding the nature of this engagement is the localised expression of global flows, that is, the movement and connections of ideas and actors that enable philanthropic action and discourse. Based on a global review of the literature, this article contextualises and applies a conceptual framework of philanthropic governance to India given the country’s prominence in the review. It also presents illustrative examples of philanthropic engagement in India.
Low-fee private schooling represents a point of heated debate in the international policy context of Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals. While on the one hand there is an increased push for free and universal access with assumed State responsibility, reports on the mushrooming of private schools targeting socially and economically disadvantaged groups in a range of developing countries, particularly across Africa and Asia, have emerged over the last decade. Low-fee private schooling has, thus, become a provocative and illuminating area of research and policy interest on the impacts of privatisation and its different forms in developing countries. This edited volume aims to add to the growing literature on low-fee private schooling by presenting seven studies in five countries (Ghana, India, Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan), and is bookended by chapters analysing some of the evidence and debates on the topic thus far.
This chapter argues that we are entering a ‘second-wave’ in our understandings and analyses of the low-fee private sector; as is the sector, of its evolution. What first seemed like small, disconnected, individual schools ‘mushrooming’ in specific contexts where there was little or poor quality state provision, has taken root as a phenomenon, purportedly of scale, backed by corporate actors, particularly in some parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. I argue that the second wave sees a shift from ‘one-off mom-and-pop teaching shops’ in schooling micro-ecosystems (individual villages, slum communities, and urban neighbourhoods), to their coexistence with corporate-backed school chains and allied service providers. These chains operate as part of a micro-system within themselves, sometimes across geographical boundaries beyond the local (across districts, cities, regions, and countries). The entry of ‘big’ corporate capital, both domestic and international, and the emergence of an ecosystem of allied service providers for this sector (education micro-finance institutions; rating systems; scripted curriculum delivery systems; education technology providers (low- and high-tech, etc.)), many of which are also corporate-backed or run, are markers of institutional evolution (DiMaggio & Powell 1983).
The tail-end of EFA, the post-2015 discourse, the disenchantment with ODA, and the growing presence of an increased array of international and domestic private non-state actors constitute a new moment of the politics of education. Alongside the funding and learning crises framing post-2015 engagement in education, there is a growing buzz around the potential of philanthropic actors to fill resource gaps and substantive gaps in scaling up ‘solutions’. This chapter reports results of a systematic-type literature review on philanthropic and private foundation engagement in education in developing countries. Results are extended by a discourse analysis of strategy documents of some of the most immediate post-2015 international fora and strategies impacting education, and comparing these with previous frameworks to locate the articulated roles of the private sector and philanthropic actors. Results of the review found a tendency of the logics of intervention of philanthropic engagement to be market-oriented, results-oriented and metrics-based, and top-down, and for the post-2015 architecture for philanthropic engagement in education to be framed by blurring corporate, philanthropic, and domestic and international development activities and actors, operating in new formal and non-formal global policy spaces. The chapter sketches the beginnings of a conceptual analytic on ‘new global philanthropy’ and philanthropic governance in the new moment of the politics of education intimated above.
Interviewed by Dutch news magazine 'Vrij Nederland'. The article asks, 'Are private schools the answer in poor countries',
Interviewed by French-Canadian news magazine, L'actualité. The article asks, 'In poor countries, can we teach like we make Big Macs'?
Interviewed by The Economist for cover story and briefing on low-cost schools in developing countries. Issue, 1-7 August 2015.
An invited guest post reviewing the World Bank's 2018 World Development Report: Learning to Realize Education's Potential
A response to The Economist published in The Guardian (UK), Working in Development section online, 12 August 2015
Invited to debate the issue of private schooling in, Smackdown Debate - 'Help or Hindrance: are low-cost private schools helping achieve quality education for all in Africa?', for World Bank's 2017 Africa Knowledge Fest
Despite international pledges, millions of children around the world are denied access to quality education. Filling in the gaps left by state provision, low-cost private schools continue to expand in many developing countries. Can low-cost private schools offer quality and creative education to the poorest families and should they be supported? Excerpts from a recorded debate.
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