VATSYAYANA/AFP

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.