South Asia are enrolled in schools identified as private schools: 27% for 6–10 year-olds, 31% for 11–15 year-olds, and 39% for 16–18 year-olds. Schools identified as private schools in household surveys may involve different types of private sector engagement, mostly, but not exclusively, in categories (1) and (2) in Table 1. Type (1) schools are managed by the private sector and financed by the private sector itself (unaided), while type (2) schools are managed by the private sector but fully or partly funded by the government (aided). The distinction between the aided and unaided types is made only in the Bangladesh and India household surveys, where there are considerable shares of both types. In Pakistan, there are a considerable number of aided schools, although these schools are relatively new. For example, under the Foundation Assisted Schools (FAS) initiative started in 2005 in Punjab province, 1,779 low-cost private schools in 29 districts were receiving support from the government as of 2010, conditional on satisfactory student achievement (Barrera-Osorio and Raju, 2010), and under the Promoting Low-Cost Private Schooling in Rural Sindh (PPRS) initiative started in 2009, 481 schools had been established and run by entrepreneurs as of 2011, with support from the government subject to operational and management requirements (Barrera-Osorio et al., 2011). Household survey information on private schooling is not available for the Maldives and Sri Lanka. Private schooling has been banned in Sri Lanka since 1961. As for the Maldives, school statistics of 2012 show that more than 3% of primary and secondary students in the country go to schools managed by private sector providers.

8. Besides engagement in aided and unaided schools, the private sector may provide schoollevel services to the government without assuming management responsibilities. This is type (3) in Table 1, and, in our definition, it does not include numerous contractual engagements between the government and private providers that do not involve school-level services. In India, NGOs such as Pratham and the Akshara Foundation, as well as universities and IT firms engage in a large number of classroom support activities with government schools. We do not find substantive evidence of this type of partnership in the other countries. We find type (4) in Afghanistan, where, under Partnership for Advancing Community-Based Education (PACE-A, funded by USAID) in 2006-11, a consortium of NGOs built and managed village-based schools, providing primary education to about 100,000 children in rural underserved localities in 19 provinces, with a goal of transferring ownership, including funding and management, to the government (see, for example, Burde and Linden, forthcoming). Outside-classroom tutoring - type (5) - is reported in household surveys for Bangladesh and Nepal, where it is prevalent, and interestingly reported also for Bhutan, where it is almost non-existent (less than 1% among Bhutanese students) and prohibited by law. Other sources indicate that tutoring is common in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as well (see, for example, Aslam and Atherton, 2012, and Jayachandran, 2012), although the information is not reported in household surveys for these countries. We are not aware of any dataset or written document on tutoring in the Maldives; however, informal interviews conducted by World Bank staff indicate that at least 80% of primary and secondary school students take private tutoring. No substantive information is available on the prevalence of tutoring in Afghanistan.

whereas school-level surveys tend to collect data only from identifiable schools either as registered in the government’s database or as spotted by survey administrators. Some schools can be of such small sizes, such as oneteacher schools that are quite common in rural areas, and/or located in such remote or crowded areas with small or no sign boards that survey administrators are likely to miss them. Therefore household surveys may be particularly helpful in depicting private schooling in remote and rural areas.

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