Empowering districts and schools with data: A digital platform approach to co-create and scale education management information system innovations
Programs and partnerships
Lead institution(s)
Summary
In most African countries, decentralization in the education sector has included devolving components of policy and management functions to district and school levels. For instance, enrolment of learners and teacher deployment have been transferred to districts and schools.Read more
In most African countries, decentralization in the education sector has included devolving components of policy and management functions to district and school levels. For instance, enrolment of learners and teacher deployment have been transferred to districts and schools. However, it has been challenging for district commissioners, school leaders and administrators to effectively manage the intake of learners, deploy teachers and distribute learning materials based on accurate and timely data. The education management information system (EMIS) that provides most of the needed data on learners and teachers, and the analysis that comes with it, is still centralized at the ministries’ headquarters. There is an increasing demand from managers for additional data on students’ characteristics to better guide interventions to address equity and inclusion issues, as well as data on learning outcomes to assess the quality of education systems. As a result, there is a call for improving EMIS to ensure that the transmission of crucial quality data is timely and allows for effective decision-making at all levels, more specifically in addressing gender, equity and inclusion issues at the district and school levels.
This project draws on decades of experimentation with an innovative digital platform called the District Health Information System carried out in the health sector by the Health Information Systems Program of the University of Oslo, Sweden. The District Health Information System has recently been tried with success in the Gambia, Togo and Uganda to address the lack of EMIS. The project will build on the lessons from the use of the District Health Information System in the Gambia, Togo and Uganda, and will respond to new calls from eSwatini, Mozambique, Senegal and Sierra Leone to enhance data-driven decision-making. This includes operationalizing indicators related to gender, equity and social inclusion at district and school levels.
Using action research cycles, researchers and practitioners will identify data-management and data-use challenges and their underlying causes. Two districts of excellence in each of the seven countries will serve as learning sites where high standards of research and resources will be used to generate and share evidence and innovations regarding decentralized data management, dissemination and use.