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In rural India, half of all schoolchildren are in private schools, but it's not because they're from wealthy families. And the phenomenon goes way beyond India. British Professor of Education James Tooley and his research team also visited slums and shantytowns in China, Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria, where they found, surprisingly, that "the vast majority of schoolchildren were found to be in 'budget' private schools" in the areas surveyed.

Entrepreneurs from these communities have started small schools, hiring teachers from the communities and charging just a few dollars a month. Students are performing better, teachers are more dedicated, and even the school facilities are better in most cases than at public schools. And all of it costs much less per student.

You can find these so-called "slum schools" in Somaliland, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Uganda, Pakistan, the Caribbean, and the list goes on. While they may be microscopic compared to their larger, richer cousins in, say, Andover and Exeter, these shoestring operations are where the action is in the developing world.

How can the international community support slum schools? One way is for microfinance institutions to reach out to private school owners by providing small loans to help them upgrade facilities. Since these businesses are operating on a quasi-legal basis, owners have little hope of getting a traditional bank loan. Another possibility would be offering school vouchers—always a hot topic in American domestic politics—so that poor families can give their kids a better education.

Christine Bowers is a consultant at the World Bank Group and the godmother of the Private Sector Development Blog. Writers from the PSDBlog will be contributing a regular series of posts for Passport entitled "Fighting Poverty With Markets."

For more information on this topic, check out James Tooley's E.G. West Research Center.

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By any standards, the $40 million Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls is extravagant. The school's 152 female students enjoy a campus that ranges over 22 acres and 28 buildings. Living quarters include oversize rooms with 5-star hotel quality linens, a yoga studio, a beauty salon, indoor and outdoor theaters, hundreds of pieces of original artwork, and other lavish amenities. None of this would be all that surprising were the newly opened academy found in Connecticut's wealthy suburbs. But it's not. It's located 40 miles outside Johannesburg, South Africa.

And that means Oprah has been taking some heat. Some detractors don't like her extravagance. "It is hard not to see that many feel that what Ms. Winfrey is doing is too much," one anonymous South African school official quipped. Others think Oprah's money could have been better spent in the U.S. That argument has always struck me as short sighted. I'm from Omaha, where I constantly hear people whispering quietly that billionaire Warren Buffet does a lot of good for the world through his charity, but he doesn't do much for Omaha. So what? Shouldn't there be a distribution of resources in philanthropy? What's wrong with the mega-rich focusing on global issues and the just-a-little-rich focusing their efforts closer to home?

For the most part, though, even Oprah's critics have been willing to thank her for her charity and move on. That is, until she dared to respond with these comments:

If you are a child in the United States, you can get an education. I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn't there. If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don't ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school."

Now, just like comedian Bill Cosby before her, Oprah finds herself under friendly fire from the African American community. "Oh, no, she didn't," blasted Eugene Robinson in today's WaPo. Robinson is right to argue that materialism is an American problem, not just an issue in American inner-cities and their minority communities.

The better critique of Oprah's charity, though, is to ask whether she is doing the most good she can with the money she spends. The poor need a lot of things, but schools with beauty salons? I have no doubt that one $40 million super-school will do a lot of good in South Africa. But wouldn't four $10 million schools do more?

The Chinese government has just announced a new $1 billion plan to provide free education to 150 million rural children. Their schooling has been ostensibly free for decades, but fees are often introduced by local authorities, leaving cash-strapped parents unable to pay. (Fees average $18 a child in rural areas, where the average income is approximately $367).

The primary motivation behind the plan is to narrow the ever-widening gap between wealthy, urban Chinese and their poorer, rural fellow citizens. Education is one of the top financial burdens for rural families, who have been largely left behind in China's economic boom.

Higher spending on education is just one of several initiatives, including more and better rural healthcare, that the government has promised to deliver in response to growing rural unrest. Whether it's enough to stop the riots that seem to be occuring more and more across the countryside remains to be seen. Ironically, one group of children is excluded from the new education plan: The children of the millions of rural families who have flocked to China's booming cities in recent years.

The French have always been gung-ho about preserving their unique history and identity. They are now, perhaps, taking it just a little bit too far. The country's governing party, UMP, is proposing that wine classes should be introduced into French schools, which would teach the "history and qualities of various types of French wine." The French wine industry has been hit hard by competition overseas and decrease in domestic consumption. The government argues, therefore, that in order "to hold a forceful position in the world, French wine must first assume a strong position at home." What's next? Cheese classes?

Ban Ki-moon, Roger Ebert, Ghazi al-Yawar... What do these people have in common? They were all trained in universities that top this week's FP List of the Ivy League of the developing world. It seems that institutions that produce influential international figures are not only restricted to those in North America and Europe. Watch out, Harvard.

Google is at it again. This time it's all set to revolutionize the world of philanthropy with Google.org, its for-profit charitable arm that, with $1 billion in seed money, is out to tackle global poverty, protect the environment, and spur energy innovations. So, how does Google aim to achieve these ambitious goals? One NGO, Planet Read, one of Google's first grant recipients, offers a look at how Google would go about it.

There has been much ado in the press about India's highly–educated, English-speaking workforce stealing white-collar American jobs. But that attention masks the fact that almost 50 percent of India is without access to literacy programs. Planet Read, created by Biju Kothari, aims to change all that. By combining televised Bollywood song and dance routines (the infatuation of millions of Indians) with karaoke-style subtitling, Kothari hopes that people who ordinarily have no reading practice will follow the words as they watch and sing along.

On the Google blog last year, Kothari wrote:

More than 500 million people in India have access to TV and 40 percent of these viewers have low literacy skills and are poor. Through PlanetRead's approach, over 200 million early-literates in India are getting weekly reading practice from Same Language Subtitling (SLS) using TV. The cost of SLS? Every U.S. dollar covers regular reading for 10,000 people – for a year.

Even on this beautiful summer's day, it is hard to be overly optimistic in Washington right now. The Marines are calling up reservists for combat duty, the Middle East seems to be going to hell in a handcart, and respected economists are predicting the imminent bankruptcy of the United States. Little wonder then, that more than two thirds of voters say the country is on the wrong track. But there is a reason for Americans to be cheerful: Their universities.

A ranking of the top 100 global universities in Newsweek International demonstrates just how dominant America is in the higher-ed field. Eight of the top 10 schools are in the States, as are 15 of the top 20. One state, California, has as many top 20 entrants as every foreign country combined. The only thing more dominant than America is the Anglosphere, which occupies the first 15 spots on the list and boasts 23 of the top 25 schools. 

When you consider how universities drive the knowledge economy, this ranking should cheer up even the most determined Eeyores amongst you. Equally, Europeans should be distressed by the results. If you exclude the United Kingdom, the highest ranked EU university is 43rd—directly below Canada's McGill University. As an op-ed in the FT this morning points out, if Europe doesn't reverse this situation, "it can expect a slow but inexorable erosion of the basis of its prosperity."

Hat Tip: Norm

India's education ministry has decided to opt out of an MIT-inspired initiative to provide $100 laptops to school children across the developing world. Calling the plan "pedagogically suspect", India's Ministry of Human Resources Development determined that its money could be better spent on badly needed classrooms and teachers than on the impact-resistant, colorful machines designed to bring computer literacy, Internet access, and educational materials to kids in remote and underserved areas. 

The decision doesn't spell the end of the initiative - Nigeria has already signed up to buy 1 million of the gadgets - but it is certainly a challenge for the One Laptop Per Child campaign, which kicked off at Davos in January 2005. India was a potentially huge market, and the computers won't go into production until at least 5 million orders are received. Be sure to check out this article in Wired about how the computers were designed with developing-world constraints in mind: impervious to dust, extra-long battery life, and able to network with other computers up to 10 miles away.

I have a two and a half year-old niece who is obsessed with Dora the Explorer. Actually, obsessed isn't nearly strong enough of a word. I'm convinced nothing short of a rigorous regimen of methadone treatments could wean her off of the Dora narcotic. But apparently Dora the Explorer is old news for some toddlers, like three-year-old Henry Schally, of St. Paul, Minnesota, who prefers to watch The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Yes. The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.

At Henry's most recent birthday party, the cake was decorated with a photo of the newshour cast, the partygoers wore Jim Lehrer party hats, and the prize gift was an autographed photo of "Jimmy Jimmy BoBo" (that’s “Jim Lehrer” in three-year-old speak). Don't miss the video on WCCO's website. Here's my question. What kind of gift do you bring to a Newshour-themed birthday bash? The 9/11 Commission Report? An American flag bow tie? I'm thinking a 2-year subscription to FP would go over quite well.