An EMIS Shift for Equitable and Inclusive Education
DHIS2 for Education takes advantage of decades of experience using DHIS2 for public-sector information management in more than 70 countries across the world. 6 Ministries of Education are involved in the global research project: Eswatini, Mozambique, The Gambia, Sri Lanka, Togo and Uganda.
The Gambian Education Sector has made progress in providing educational services, increasing enrollment numbers and reaching gender parity in basic and secondary education. The Gambia has also made significant efforts to address quality challenges in areas such as teacher qualifications and deployments, integrating public school curricula in madrassas, and piloting technologyinformed teaching approaches. The Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education (MoBSE) has made equitable, inclusive and quality education a top priority in the Education Policy 2016-2030 with the improvement of learning outcomes a major objective.
The current EMIS is highly centralized; characterized by an aggregated and paper-based data system, with the Annual School Census (ASC) as the primary data source. The ASC is distributed to schools, with manual data entry leading to an annual statistical yearbook as a tool for monitoring and evaluation of the education sector. Fragmented databases for HR, examinations and infrastructure exist, with an absence of a comprehensive database bringing together different data sources for cross-analysis and planning.
There has been a critical EMIS shift, which saw an alignment of EMIS to the Education Policy 2016-2030 and the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework, with an aim to increase awareness on equity, inclusion and quality educational and social services. This entails closing the data gap to ensure EMIS is able to focus on individual teachers and learners, moving from aggregate to include individual teacher and learner tracking to better understand who learners are, the environment around them and how this impacts the learning experience in order to plan and respond.
In 2021 a national student registration exercise launched the individual student identification number, marking the start of the potential for longitudinal tracking of students.
DHIS2 for Education has been introduced in The Gambia to respond to this shift, leveraging existing health-sector DHIS2 capacity and facilitating a move to ensure equity, inclusion and quality educational services through digitization of EMIS and collection of individual-level data.
