William Easterly dedicates his recent book The White Man’s Burden to 10-year-old Amaretch, an Ethiopian girl whose name means “beautiful one”, and the millions of children like her. Her days are spent collecting branches to sell for a pittance. She wants to go to school but her parents cannot afford it. “Could one of you,” he asks, of entrepreneurs of all kinds, “discover a way to put a firewood-laden Ethiopian pre-teen girl named Amaretch in school?”

There are entrepreneurs across the developing world already showing the way. The accepted wisdom says children such as Amaretch need billions more dollars in aid for state education. But the poor must “be patient”, say the development experts, because state education needs first to be reformed to rid it of corruption and inefficiencies.

The accepted wisdom is wrong. It ignores the reality that poor parents are abandoning public schools en masse, to send their children to “budget” private schools that charge low fees – perhaps one or two dollars per month, affordable even to parents on poverty-line wages.

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