ABSTRACT
The initial emergence of the low-fee private sector and its subsequent evolution into an attractive sector for business backed by domestic and international corporate investment holds an important and divisive place as we enter the post-2015 era in global education. Global civil society actors such as the Right to Education Project, the Soros Open Society Foundations, and the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights have been spurred into developing a human rights framework for private sector engagement in education. It is infused with the motivation to actively create a global market for the corporate-backed low-fee private sector. Positioning low-fee private schools as publicprivate partnership (PPP) initiatives is a notable shift in policy discourse and practice, which should not go unnoticed. The waves of research on the low-fee private sector, the languages of PPPs was neither used to describe low-fee private schools, nor were such schools thus conceptualized.
