"Over the past decade, an outstanding trend has been the growth of private sector involvement in the financing and provision of education at a global scale, which is altering profoundly the way education is governed. Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are one of the main policy proposals under this rapidly emerging trend. International organizations with great capacity to shape educational agendas, including the World Bank, regional development banks or UNICEF, are advocating the introduction of PPPs in education to enhance users capacity to choose, to increase competition among different providers and to benefit the education experience of the poorest. Policies that promote competition by directly funding the educational demand (a la vouchers) and creating charter schools (independent private providers publicly funded) are the most significant measures of PPP reforms being disseminated today.In recent years, PPP reforms are being extended to a range of national education systems and to some specific regions in an experimental form. In Latin America, however, there have been some related-experiences in education since the beginning of the eighties (the case of Chile being the most significant one). This project aims at analyzing the emergence and evolution of PPP policies, as well as its implementation and impact in a sample of countries of the Latin-American region. Related objectives of the project are: (1) to study the expansion and adoption of PPP programmes in countries with different levels of education privatization, (2) to analyze the strategic responses of education actors in the context of PPP frameworks, and (3) to evaluate the impact of PPPs on several dimensions, with a focus on the effects on educational equity and the poorest population. At the methodological level, case studies will be carried out in four locations of Chile and Colombia, which will combine qualitative and quantitative approaches that will be analyzed from a comparative perspective."