Giving Compass' Take:

• Getting Smart reports on Bridge International Academies, a group that offers low-cost, high-quality private education options in many African countries.

• Technology drives much of the efforts listed in this piece, with tuitions as low as $5 per month. Could Bridge expand beyond its current five-country presence? Are their downsides to such a model?

• In India, there may be a billion dollar opportunity in affordable private schools.

When visiting the massive slums surrounding Nairobi, Kenya, I was surprised to learn that most of the children attended private schools. As professor James Tooley shared in his book The Beautiful Tree, edupreneurs in the slums of Africa and Asia are addressing the problem of access to educational quality by developing low-cost private schools.

The most important group working in low-cost private schools is Bridge International Academies led by Jay Kimmelman. After selling an assessment system to a publisher 15 years ago he began investigating developing world education in communities where parents are earning less than $2 per day.

With a shared vision to create a high-quality, affordable education system, Kimmelman and co-founder Shannon May launched Bridge in 2007 and opened a school in Nairobi in 2009 and began to engineer out cost and design in quality.

A mobile payment system made the tuition of about $5 per month (now the global average is about $7 per month) easier to pay. By the end of 2010, they had 1,300 students and a well-developed school development system.

The model is based on well-supported teachers, lessons based on the curriculum of the countries served, and a technology platform enabling data-driven personalized instruction.

Read the full article about low-cost schools in Africa by Tom Vander Ark at Getting Smart.