Liberia is outsourcing primary schools to a start-up backed by Mark Zuckerberg

In 2013, after all 25,000 high school students sitting state university entrance exams failed, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf admitted that the education system was “a mess” and called for a complete overhaul.

Now it seems Sirleaf’s government has decided that rather than overhauling the education system themselves, they’re going to pay someone else to do it for them. Under a pilot program called “Partnership Schools for Liberia,” the Liberian government will outsource some of its primary and early childhood educational system to private companies over the next five years.

One huge contract has gone to a private company called Bridge International Academies — reportedly to the tune of $65 million. And it’s causing some real controversy.

The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur for the right to education, Kishore Singh, has denounced the plan as “completely unacceptable” and “a blatant violation of Liberia’s international obligations under the right to education.” A coalition of teachers unions and civil society groups in Liberia issued an open letter announcing their opposition. Education International, an international federation of unions, has warned that “privatisation vultures” involved in the plan “pose [a] serious threat to Liberia’s public education system.”

…Bridge’s “academy in a box” model has attracted investment from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, which invested $10 million each. Bill Gates and the UK government’s Department for International Development are also investors.

Here is the Vox story.   As they say, big steps toward a much better world…

Here is coverage from prior efforts in Kenya, hat tips go to Dani Rodrik and Alex T.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed