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Visiting Research Fellow in Education, University of Sussex

Joanna Härmä has been researching relatively low-fee private schooling targeting the relatively poor since 2004. She researched this issue across 13 remote, rural villages in western Uttar Pradesh India for her doctoral work, completing her DPhil at the Centre for International Education at the University of Sussex in 2008. A key thread from this research has continued through all her later work: that low-fee private schools are cropping up in many locations, in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, but are inaccessible to the poorest. They are appearing where families are either not served by government schools close enough to their homes, or are dissatisfied with the quality of provision on offer. Joanna has now researched this topic in three locations in Nigeria, as well as in India, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia. She has worked more broadly in education in Nigeria (where she lived for nearly three years), Kenya, Malawi and Bangladesh. She also worked for over three years at the Education for All Global Monitoring Report at UNESCO in Paris on the final three reports in the series (2012, 2013/14 and 2015), where she extended her research interests into early childhood care and education, authoring the chapter on this topic for the 2015 Report

Experience

  • –present
    Visiting Research Fellow in Education, University of Sussex