DHIS2 for Education: Bringing stakeholders together at the Conference & Academy in Sri Lanka
The 2024 DHIS2 EMIS Conference and Academy took place in Colombo, Sri Lanka from 6-10 May, and was attended by around 100 national and international participants. The national participants came from all levels of the education system, including provinces, districts and schools. In addition, participants from the global KIX EMAP network joined online for the conference. With an opening by the State Minister of Education (MoE) and the Dean of the University of Colombo, the conference was organized as a collaboration between the MoE, led by the director of the EMIS unit, the University of Oslo, and HISP network nodes in Sri Lanka, Mozambique, Uganda, and Togo. Conference topics and training were centered around supporting education data management and improved availability and use of data for sector planning, monitoring and resource allocation. International experiences with EMIS digitalization were presented by government representatives from the Gambia and Eswatini. Perspectives were further broadened beyond the education sector by presentations from the Sri Lanka Ministry of Health and from Save the Children Sri Lanka and Waliku, which is leading exciting innovations using DHIS2 to track in multiple countries.
Video recordings of the conference sessions are available here
As a direct result of the event and training, the Ministry of Education initiated internal discussions about progress on the digitalization of education data at different levels. Specifically, the Ministry is aiming to deploy DHIS2 to manage the monitoring and evaluation of the school meal programme, the implementation of which is a collaborative work of the Presidential Secretariat, Ministry of Education, and Ministry of Health. Discussions are currently underway with the participation of all these stakeholders and the HISP Sri Lanka team to customize and deploy DHIS2 in a phased manner. The EMIS conference and academy was also attended by provincial and school-level focal points in Sri Lanka. Following the event, several schools and provinces have expressed their interest in piloting the SEMIS (student-staff-school) app to manage requirements around individual student tracking. Discussions are currently underway to identify the feasibility of deploying the SEMIS app in the Central province.
