 Hello everyone. Are we are we on with audio? Okay, thank you so much to everyone online we always thought online first just say thank you so much for joining us sorry that we're a little bit late. We had a bit of a delay with moving from the auditorium to this room so very much appreciate that you join us and looking forward to you all being here I just wanted to start with online first they always get a little extra because they're online. And hello to everyone in the room it's such a pleasure to have you all here we really appreciate as well the time that you've taken to come talk to us and I hope there'll be lots of time for some questions. And discussion in between the different presentations so we'll try not to pack it in too much, but we have started a little bit late so we will do our best to catch up. My name before the alarm yes thank you for saying that. So very exciting for all the don't know Norway there is a national alarm system going off across the entire country today which usually warns us if there's something bad going to happen. This is what now we need to go downstairs and in the basement. And today, even worse what they are testing is a new system which means that our phones are also if they connected to the network they're also going to start an alarm. So we will try to end by 10 to 12 so that we can experience that experience outside of this room and not online and I hope you don't get to experience that beyond line. So my name is Sophia Cosiakis I'm the emiss project management manager working at the University of Oslo. I work in a really beautiful team of many, many, many people I said earlier in the plenary session it takes a village to learn what it is about the education sector that DHS to and the his network and all that we've learned is able to contribute with. I wanted to start by saying that we have six partner countries who have come along a long journey with us. Those countries are the Gambia, where we have aggregates and tracker data that's being explored. We have Togo, Uganda, Mozambique, Eswatini and Sri Lanka and there really is some growing interest from many countries reading out to understand either how DHS to can be leveraged as a full national scale system for their their emiss or how it can complement existing systems. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time going through all the list here because you will be able to get the slides, but I just want to highlight that the education sector has really two broad data challenges. One is the availability of data. We have lots and lots and lots of data but we're not using it quickly enough and timely enough to be able to respond where it matters. We're also not maybe visualizing it in a way that makes good sense where we can respond and look at things in comparison to one another, and then very importantly and maybe the most difficult is the data use. So we've been as a team trying to pluck up all those data use stories as much as we can, no matter how small they are to us there are gold little nuggets to see that how we can start to learn from each other and continue that that journey. Another thing I really want to highlight is integration with existing systems. So DHS to approach is not to come in and take away completely another system but rather to see how we can play well with that system. So we know that for many years there might be capacity that's built up in a different system. Many, many people within the ecosystem understand it and use it as maybe a data collection tool, but maybe it has a little gap and that might be analyzing that data, and we can even analyze that data over many, many, many years. So in Togo right now we have legacy data from the year 2000, which has been all the way transported into DHS to so you can see those trains. I'm going on too long. We don't have time. Let me stop. There's so many cool things to talk about so I need to stop. I just want to highlight the university collaborations you can see here on the screen we've got the University of Gambia. Some really beautiful work starting to happen there and I hope that by the next annual conference will have even more to share. Grant, how do I move to the next slide? Click. Sorry. Thanks everyone. I was liking seeing everyone. I'm going to pass it over to Tairia Sanmed who is the associate professor here and associate professor here at the University of Oslo. He's working very closely with PhD and master's students that are part of the DHS to for education project. I just wanted to emphasize by the slide by saying that we really are working as much as we can closely with PhD candidates. We're lucky to have CD Ahmed Jalo in the room with us today. He is from the Ministry of Education in the Gambia, but also PhD candidates. So having having that power of being able to see what your empirical country in the flesh and also decide what your focus is based on policy directives within a country really makes for a special mix of reflection. Perhaps for CD himself as an individual for his country and then also he can share with other countries as well, which is very powerful. So Tairia, I pass it over to you and unfortunately I left the very fancy diagram, which we said we maybe mustn't. But you can use this mic if you would like. Just come a bit closer. Good morning. We can interact a bit with the slide. I just want to since you my colleagues covered so well, why education. I think I could. I wanted to reflect a bit on why us into education. And I think that is because we have a digital platform ecosystem. I'll try to reflect a bit about what I mean by that. So I mean, there are many, many softwares already in the education sector. Some of them actually catering specifically to education management information systems just like this has to help build its success success around supporting HMIS or health information system strengthening. But if you look at the initiatives, they have also existed a few of them for quite a few years, but they haven't really built an ecosystem around. So, so there are products, software products. And today it's also nice to when you have a software product to refer to it as a platform. So you have a product software code and then you slap open API is on top of it and then you say you have a platform. But you don't necessarily have an ecosystem on around that platform. And then it doesn't really matter whether you have open API is if nobody is really interacting with the API is building extensions, building capacity around it. So I think that's that's the big difference. And then the question is for other actors, you know, how, how do you replicate that. And I think my my view on that is that that is not so easy. There isn't any quick fix for software there are quick fixes you can fork the chance to and then you have a nice, you know, platform to start with but it's just it's just a technical, you can't, you know, copy paste the community and the and the and the capacity in countries. And that's I think is the is the challenge. Right. So, like Sophia said, we work with universities now moving into education to build exactly the same capacity that yarn and others started with very, very long ago in in health right to build this collaborations between universities and ministries to meet national needs and to build that around a particular design and that is the chance to artifact the platform. If you think of it, I think there is this, you know, growing gap potentially between the sign and use and the community is there to fill that gap, because if you have a hammer. It has very obvious uses and you don't really need many people to figure out what the uses are it's basically for hitting nails and pulling them out again. So when you have something complex bank details to it can be configured extended to all kinds of use cases like they say, all kinds of purposes, and you need a whole community to be able to identify the possible uses right to come up with value propositions to say, Hey, these are two can be used for this but it can also be used for this, and we're using it for this maybe you can also do that. And I think that's that's the challenging part that we have a software that is growing in complexity, and it's growing in terms of number of and heterogeneity of use cases and users. So then why would we also make it more complicated by moving into education I think. We use the term spillover I think in the plenary. We see that we have succeeded in building this ecosystem around the chance to, in terms of capacity and and community, and that is incredibly hard. And then we see that there is a potential spillover into education where that has not really happened. But you don't have these communities like ours and I mean this whole conference is a good testimony to the community part right that we have a strong community that can actually take this tool and transform it into useful things in in many different settings. I think that's, that's what I wanted to say and then I mean this this, I said this about design and use right so the more different use cases, the more we need to translate them and configure the chance to to meet them but there are many strong similarities to education, even if on the ground, the service provision is very different from health. I think when you look at the ministry is how they're set up and what kind of indicators they're looking at them, and how they need to act on data, things are very similar. So we have a lot of knowledge in countries within the Ministry of Health. It was also mentioned in the plenary that you know Ministry of Health could be part of helping out training Ministry of Education which is a great situation. And of course this is we have some lack of standard in our industry, often software products drive the innovations and then standards come afterwards and since there isn't too many standards, there are some great synergies across sectors by using the same platform because then you have interoperability already, and you can exchange data between health and education and other sectors. I just wanted to share this idea that you know what we have is an ecosystem and that makes this very valuable. And it's possible of course to learn from it, but I think there is no quick fix and kind of copying an ecosystem and that's why we should move into and support education because we have the capacity and the community to do so. My colleagues sold very good, but very well the case that something is needed in education, but I think this is why we should, we should do it. And this figure is actually from a paper that the team wrote together, it's in this is a gem background papers and that's, as I understand it kind of a Bible for education folks interested in technology and other things so it's, it's we're trying to share this idea, because we don't need to be the only actor obviously in this space, other others can learn from from our community potentially. I think that's what I wanted to say of course we are working them in our project in all of these dimensions, I mean we are informing the software, listening to country requirements and trying to inform the further development of the chance to now also listening to education sector without making it too complicated because we don't want to break the chance to with with all kinds of requirements right that's important. And we're also building capacity like Sophia said, I'm leading the collaboration with the University of the Gambia to try to come up with a master program and the diploma program to create a new caterer of experts that can, you know spearhead the chance to into education and meet the country capacity needs. And of course the community we're also making strides to to build a community around education and I guess you're all kind of candidates are already part of that. Thank you. Thank you so much. I think this was important to emphasize because we are working within this ecosystem. It's not just the software product but it's all of these. There are some surprising parts that are helping us to learn and move the way forward. So really thank you for that. And I would now like to cross it over I'm just making sure that everyone online can hear me, Mr Lukman judgey from the African Union iPad has joined us and I'm just making sure judgey that you can hear us and that the audio is working. Thank you Sophia I hear you loud and clear. Let me just confirm if you can hear me. Just one second we're just checking because the audio is not coming through here. Can you hear me. So for that we are just testing the audio maybe I can do a very quick introduction so Mr Lukman judgey is working for the African Union iPad as I mentioned that it's actually a very important body. It's focusing on has emis mandates. And I think a very important part of Mr judgey and the team's work is working together with member states on a set of emis norms and standards. And we really wanted to frame the discussion before we go into any more examples about what we're doing within the important framework that helps us to see how are different countries doing in terms of what should be a emis norms and standard. And it's very important that he will speak to as well as how this has been a country lead lead endeavor. So sorry for that but Mr Lukman judgey are you able to hear us and can we hear you now. Yes, I can hear you loud and clear. Please confirm if you can hear me. We can't hear you so sorry we are just. It seems the colleagues. Definitely message saying that they can hear me online. Okay, we're going to do that so sorry for that. Thank you for confirming you can hear us we just can't hear you so we're getting one more solution down. Apologies for that. Okay. We are now able to hear you. Can you hear me now. Thank you very much, Sophia. Thank you very much. Thank you for for the introduction. My name is look man look man judgey and working for the African Union. I did the work of the African Union on education data systems and emis in general. I am responsible for working with 55 member states to support the capacity improvements of national data production processes as well as usage as well. And of course this of course entails a lot of things can you hear me please. Can you hear me. Yes, we can hear you. Yeah, so so I'll proceed with my presentation this morning I'll be speaking briefly for about 10 minutes or so about the EU image norms and standards. So I'll be speaking about the EU image norms and standards. The key messages I would like to just like a summary of my presentation will focus in just on three things to inform you that the EU image norms and standards as serves as the premier image capacity assessment tool for our member states. This is what they've been using to conduct self assessment, as well as for conducting peer reviews as well. I wouldn't want to go into the history of how we came about the document how the regional community communities themselves now have their own norms and standards. We piloted these instruments within the subject and instructed every other region to develop a norms and standards so it's a long history but I wouldn't want to go into into that now. So the tool of course is useful capacity assessment at the national level and also for peer reviews. I'll be speaking briefly about our, our endeavor last week in Lesotho where we just conducted a fantastic peer review exercise. It was a learning experience for everyone involved as well it also spells out the tool itself first out illegal the technical and the policy level direction that the country is expected to take to ensure that we have a functional image system image system is one thing. It's functional, which means does it respond to national needs, and does it respond to the needs and demands of development partners as well. So, these are the three key messages of my, you can see the norms and standards itself has about four standards and 15 norms. And you can see it has the standard on on the policy and legal framework of image or on the national data production processes. It talks also about resource availability. It talks about statistical processes and it also talks about education information reporting. So in all of these that you have all of these five standards I shared between, for example, the directorate of planning the statistics and the ICT units. In some cases, this department or this unit have to interface with other quite important unit outside of the directorate of planning but these are the norms and standards that this document spells out. I can see them that is the mandate, which is all very legal. There is the quality commitment that is the statistical confidentiality. Some of these policy frameworks, for example, have to interface with with existing national frameworks for example the statistical act, for example, if it exists. In some cases, these interfaces have to, sorry, these legal frameworks have to interface for example the image policy and all of the other documents that are available. And they also are on resources, you know, how is it funded, you know, how what is the percentage of the of the ministry's budget for example that goes into data production that goes into ICT. Basically just availability of resources. And then there is the statistical processes. Statistical process is found out how data is collected, who supplies the data, how it is transported, what are the procedures that are that the ministry, for example, applies in this process. It is very boring and respondent. There's one school or one data production unit or hub or node have to produce more data than others. All of these things are what we score between zero to four. I will get to that in a minute. And I also have the reporting. When you collect data from people, what do you do with data? You just keep it or you just make your own decisions at a level. In some cases, there should be that feedback to the schools and to others to understand why they are producing, why they are giving you data in the first place. Accuracy and reliability, timeliness and punctuality, coherence, consistency and all of that comparability. So these are just basically what the entire document entails. I could share with the latest version to the sectorial if anyone is interested in having a copy of it. I think we would make the commitment to share with everyone. How do we do this? What is our approach? How is this document used by our countries? Like I mentioned, about a year and a half ago, our countries conducted some training, we did conduct some trainings for them on how to use this tool to conduct self-assessment. And we even gave them certificates for it, which means they not only can self-assess themselves, they can also act as peer reviewers to other countries. So we also have facilitation by the RECs. The RECs are a very, very important element in this process because when we conduct peer review exercises, we like to use countries within the same rank because of shared experiences, because there could be easy knowledge transfer and peer learning. We also have in-country visits where the African Union and some developing partners do visit the countries and perhaps just interview them or have some questions on a particular norms or standard, like for example the one we had in Lesotho. Then there are also questionnaires. So I have to go back a little bit. Questionnaires are developed against each of these norms. You have just very short, like in Lesotho we had a questionnaire of 10 questions against each of the norms, where then we meet with the exams and records or we are meeting with the planners or the statisticians or the IT team or the policy makers within the ministry to develop questionnaires against each of these. And then we also have interviews where we score them based on zero to four. So we score them, what do you think, where would you score yourself in this? In fact, when Lesotho conducted the first self-assessment in 2021, before we arrived to the country to conduct actually a field peer review with other members, they have to take the exam again they said and they scored themselves about 25% lower than they scored themselves in 2021, which means there were changes in IT, there were changes in policy, there were changes in human resource, there were changes in finances as well. So they thought why they were doing better in 2021, in 2023 when they took the assessment again, they scored themselves quite a significant point lower than they had done before. So the coverage of this, this covers all of the regions of Africa, ECOWAS does have any norms and standards, and the reason why they all have regional norms and standards is because when the AU conceived the idea to develop this framework, we reached out to the regions of ECOWAS to also, no we piloted this first at Sadeq, we piloted this at Sadeq and then even encouraged this to be developed at other regional economic communities as well. So it covers the entire regions of the continent. Before I go to the next slide, which happens looks like it may be my last slide, I want to briefly speak about, if time permits me to speak about the Lesotho experience. What we found out in Lesotho is that there is, we now quite understand better when they say a country does not have or a country is not able to produce data, we know what it means when they cannot produce data. When we think it's IT sometimes, sometimes it's not IT, when we think it's policy, sometimes it's not policy, when we think it's resources, human resources and all of that. We thought when you see a blank in front of an indicator of an African country on UAS website, there are so many conditions, there are so many reasons why that could be and this peer review exercise really exposed us to that. So we looked at, for example now, I'll give you an example on the IT side since I'm a DHS. Lesotho is known to be using the open image system from UNESCO, and they gave quite a lot of reasons why that system was not working. But from our assessment, I can categorically tell you that even if they get a new system right now, it's going to have the same fate it may fail as well. So there are so many policy level human resource infrastructure issues that needed to be addressed before a technology solution is deployed because it may suffer the same fate. And we've had very well from the minister himself and from the deputy permanent secretary that they are migrating to DHS and our own call to them as the AUC was that please before DHS is finally deployed or you can make it a complete package to fix your infrastructure needs to fix some some some alignment to statistical art who produces data, who is mandated to produce data so that you don't just have a fantastic system, but then it's empty doesn't receive data because all of these bottlenecks are there. I could go on and on about the cluttering ministries of education in order to be able to produce effective data, but that's just a few points I wanted to make. And then what our what are the output and outcomes of using the number of standard. Of course, the output would be that will produce a report at the end of the day of our experiences. I hope to share this report with Sophia when it's available so that she can share with the rest of the team. We're waiting for Lesotho to clay it and to give us the guide and shareable to the public. But it's a fantastic report for anyone who really wants to understand the business of data production in country. And then of course the roadmap to address the gaps in what are the priority areas long term short term medium term. Quick ways that the countries will quickly fix to ensure that their system is functional. The expected outcomes of course we want to ensure that countries are able to produce quality data. It's very, very important that countries are able to produce quality data. I'll give you an example. The plan director of planning told us that she knows very well that enrollment, for example, is reducing. She can tell the enrollment is reducing, but they don't have the data to back it up. She said they don't even know how to collect the data to back what they can tell that it's improving. And for example, there's so many things that they feel at the ministry is a particular way. But the data is not actually there to convince the ministry of finance to, you know, to increase the funding to the ministry or that. So quality statistics is very important. Then there's peer learning, peer learning, not just from country to country, but even from ministry within the ministry itself. There could be a lot of peer learning and exchanges that could occur. You will find out that in some countries, they have not even had a departmental meeting within the directorate of planning for three years. All these things are not even technology related. It's just social issues that are blocking the production of data. I think this is my last slide and I do hope that I've been able to at least expose you a little bit to what the norms and standards is all about. I'm available for questioning and comments as the proceedings are going on. Thank you very much Sophie, over to you. Thank you so much, Lukman. I really, really appreciate this. I think it's so important for us as a team as we move into the space to understand what are the frameworks that are there, what are the norms and standards that exist. And especially there is absolutely, like we said before, golden nuggets within this peer learning within these outcomes that we can look at what has already been done in country and see if there's areas we can work together with the country to frame ourselves. So we really appreciate you being here for taking the time and I'm not sure if there's any particular questions right now for Lukman. If not, we can also keep them until towards the end. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you. Looking forward to talking more. Thank you very much. No problem. Wonderful. So now we are moving on. I've got put on mute. Sorry, we're moving on to our next colleague. We've been speaking a lot about local innovations. Tadia was showing us the diagram where we saw you've got DHIS2 is this architecture platform. We've got applications that exist within it already, but there's this element of being able to be a bit flexible. So if you see something unique in the education space, how are we able to respond to that specific use case. So we thought it would be a really exciting moment to take a bit of time with CD Jalo CD Ahmed Jalo from the Ministry of Education Gambia. Also a PhD student has mentioned who's going to talk a little bit more about this journey that they've been on with daily attendance in the Gambia. So I am going to go back to the presentation and CD, please feel free to come join us. And I think you can use the mic over here. My pleasure. Thank you. I'm proposing on trying to make sure that we have individual level data available. Yes, trying to make sure that we have individual level data available, which is the primary goal of the Ministry of Education back in the Gambia of getting into this project. But as we were developing and designing this specific project, there were some other urgent issues that needed some attention. Let's show the flexibility of the HHS to respond to some specific needs or some specific situations as you know we are designing and developing the systems for a bigger purpose. So one of these innovations is the daily attendance systems. And the reason why it's important is because generally in education, education service delivery, the most important thing that the ministry can do is to provide input into the school systems. And the most important input in the school system is the teachers. And monitoring where the teachers are actually in school and whether they are giving attention to the kids as required is definitely crucial in making sure that you know we monitor and try to understand where you know the performance or lapses are coming from. So that's, I'm going to take you through some of the past experiences from in a sort of a story way, so that we can understand, you know, the way we are coming from what kind of challenges we are having and how the HSO has been so pivotal in helping solve that. So at the very beginning, you know, as with many, you know, innovations, we always start with paper, paper, paper. So paper from the school, you know, aggregated and paper to the cluster mentor that's the national level, sub regional level. Then it goes to the regional level where it is aggregated and then analyzed. So about this process in the first instance, it takes three months, a whole term for the attendance to be aggregated and then, you know, analyze at the regional level and then for the region to take action. Because attendance data is for regional data and they are the ones that, you know, for easy action to go back and make sure that it is. But it's three months to lake and usually there's no feedback that goes back to the schools, most importantly, so the schools themselves have to do their own analysis if they want to make use of the data. And it's resource intensive because, you know, there's a lot of going through and back to the foods and because everyone is doing their own analysis is sort of a duplication of resources at the very beginning. Then the second version of this attendance system, the second improvement is still pre-DHS2, but it shows how flexible the HS2 can leverage the existing instructors and build upon what is already found in the country instead of revamping, you know, systems or, you know, structures that are found there. One of the innovations that we did before was trying to introduce what we call a phone-based system. This is where we try to remove the middleman. The schools were given a simple phone and, you know, we connected this simple for using, you know, not a relationship with the network agents, with the telecommunication companies to create what we call a close user group within the school. So if the school has a SIM that was given and they would put in the, so there's a different multiple versions of this specific innovation because first it started with the schools had to call directly to the regional office and then the regional office would enter the data. But it was difficult because you would call sometimes network issues or no one is there at the desk to receive it. It requires somebody to be there every time. You know, we moved to sending SMS. Then that guy that was only receiving end of the SMS was also very difficult to get all the messages sometimes he skipped, sometimes he didn't skip. Then we decided to go to a web-based solution where, you know, using a toll-free line, you know, at 445, the SMS is now sent via SMS to the network agents, to the network operator, and they would send that to the public portal where we would, you know, then download, you know, try to analyze and then send back to the regions. But two things were a problem in that scenario. One, the schools, because we removed the region now from the operation, so the ownership was totally, totally dead. It became a problem of the ministry now, not the region. So the regions don't feel any more responsible because the data is coming from the schools direct to the ministry as they feel. And the ministry also had this added responsibility to, you know, bring out the data and then clean it because the SMS was based on a strict format that the schools have to send, and there are a lot of data quality issues with those strict formats. Then because of these challenges, it was not very efficient. So, and it takes us time to do this analysis and share back with the schools. Then we had the third phase where, you know, DHS2 came in to help solve some of this problem. So the first thing that was done was at that moment, the ministry procured tablets, as you can see in the first slide that was shared. In this one's tablets that we have shared with the schools. Now these tablets, the purpose was with the help of digital as a platform and, you know, partners with the history of Central Africa. We designed an application that is going to help the schools in formatting this data accurately and then compose, send that SMS to the network agent in the same, you know, way that the SMS was going. And then when it goes to the SMS agent instead of going to a web portal, now it goes into DHS2, which gives us instant analysis. And then the regions themselves, you know, are easily being brought back because we've given them access to this system and they are able to use the instant analysis that they have found in this, in this new system. So they have, you know, leveraged the existing infrastructures, now instant analysis and the pre-formatted SMS helped us with, you know, trying to deal with the quality issues that we had at the starting. But there were some little issues also with this first version because there was, because you're sending an application for the signing up at the first time, there was little internet that was required at the beginning. So the schools, you know, but just, it was just for configuration. So during the training we'll go and configure the mobile phones of most of the schools, then they will set up. Then we will go, but once if they log out of the application, it becomes a problem for them to log back in without internet and, you know, with rural population, it's not easy to do monitor internet. And there was also this monitoring bit and support that was missing. And this became very clear when COVID came because immediately after this innovation was brought, you know, COVID came and the schools stopped reporting. And then because schools were starting to alternate things were completion, the last thing on people's mind. So they were trying to see if we can have classes in the first instance. So then after COVID to resume became a problem. Some of us, you know, I'm sending some we are having issues, some we are not doing it the right way. So it was difficult to know how to support them or what challenges they were having and so on. And this is why, you know, last year from the mid of 2022, we implemented that version of this. The HHS2 system where for the first time, even before the data left the telephones of these schools of the head teachers, the telephones of the head teachers in these schools, they were able to visualize and analyze the data themselves. That was something that was not possible at the moment by using the local data that's already even before it is sent. So whether there's network, whether we don't have a network or not, the data that is shared is stored locally and then they have instant analysis that you know the schools can start using already. And this time we tried to, it was totally offline. So the configuration, you know, issues were removed and the school information was also sent by the SMS, which is still totally free for the schools. The SMS doesn't cost anything to the schools. So, and then the in-bit analytics that allows them to do that. Now on the other side, we made it possible for the original offices to directly monitor the attendance as it's coming. So not only whether the data is coming or not, but life analysis as it's coming. And this does what you are seeing that we're creating is filterable to the individual schools. So using this with every school that is sending attendance data and can use this account that we have already created and shared with all the schools in the country to, you know, add things to share and visualize their data once they have access to the internet or they have access to this resource. So this is another way of them getting access to the data and be using it. Then there was this log application that was also designed as part of this package, you know, using also tools from DHISU to see the issues that the schools are trying to send. If someone that is sending data from, you know, a wrong number or they are using a wrong format or, you know, the data that they are importing is wrong or, you know, whether, you know, it's overriding the previous data that you're sending. So these are the issues that we have developed and this is all controlled, not at the national level, but at the regional level, because the regional planning officers are the ones that have been given full responsibility of having this system managing it and making sure that the ownership now is fully back in control of the region, because the ministry usually don't have much to do with this. So this is just showing how we use the maps at the regional level to share the coverage of the attendance systems, the ones that are sending attendance and the ones that are not standing, and then they can easily spot out, you know, the ones and how to help them. And then we have also a list based on the schools that allows them to not only know which schools are sending, but also at what level of, you know, they are having issues in terms of sending attendance in terms of reporting to be able to help them. So and the next version, as we are seeing, you know, with the dartboard and all that, the schools are still having challenges in using this system because of the internet that is required mostly. So we are trying to leverage this existing infrastructure, you know, going forward to have something based on the telephone numbers and the series that the schools have to build a VPN system that is going to allow, you know, the schools to access this DHIS to platform anywhere, from any instance, and they will be able to visualize this, you know, frequently as possible at no cost at all to them. So this is what we have been discussing. And I'm very open to any questions that you have on the technicalities or on some of the issues, but the good thing is at the moment we have, I don't know whether we can call them a region of excellence, but one of these regions has really taken this by the home and have been, you know, sharing in their group and platforms, you know, attendance issues, attendance solutions problems, and you know, everyone have been working together to help solve each other's problems as well as the schools that are having issues and so. So, thank you very much for the attention. I'm open to any questions. Yes. Thank you so much, city. And also to mention that that region isn't right in the city center right. I think that's pretty powerful all the way out so thank you so much for that. So, for this session, usually what DHIS to does is we have abstracts that are submitted so folks will take the time to think through a case study think through a use case something they want to present and submit that formally for for it to have a moment to be in one of the sessions. And so I'm really, really happy to share that we received an abstract from a team in Uganda, it was the Ministry of Education and Sports, basic education department, a member from that team, save the children his Uganda. And I think that is all I hope I'm not forgetting anyone else. And they would like to share a little bit more about some of the work they've been trying to do of not just decentralizing to the district level but trying to take one of the unique innovations that came from the district level one step further to see how the school can actually benefit from that data that's being collected at the district level. So the new people are Ronald, who's online now I'm just checking that you can hear us and that we can hear you. If you don't mind them. Ronald are you able to hear us. I see that you are not muted. I'm just checking if we are going to. If not, we can take a pause and we can move to. Okay. Are you able to get Alfredo's presentation up. Sorry Alfredo putting you on the spot on a different time. Are you able to help us by coming up and presenting just a yes that would be great. So we'll come back to Uganda very soon. Sorry for that Ronald will chat to you to make sure that we can get the audio working. And then I'd like to take the opportunity now to introduce you to Alfredo. He is a leader developer at South Digitus who has been working to support not just the Mozambique implementation in education but also a lot of innovations when it comes to applications that are needed for the global team. So many of the applications you've been working on have been important for the work done in the Gambia but also for many other countries. So thank you. Thank you Sophia. Hi everyone. Thank you for sharing the experience for Mozambique. Regarding to the local innovation development and implementation on the education sector. So in Mozambique, we are working with the government. In order to implement the educational management information system and has a strategy, we started from two province, Nampola and Zambeza province. And there we managed to perform a set of activities with a main goal to implement a sustainable flexible and integrated education management information system. And to reach this goal, we designed some implementation strategies. We did a system evaluation, understanding what was in place, how the data is being collected and how it's flowing to the national level. We also check it on this process, the needs about what the government at national province, district and school level needs in order to have data with good quality and ready to be used. And after those two steps, we started the system development. And basically it was a process of converting in a structured way, the purpose of tools that they have in place to the system. And for that, we did initially we did some aggregated data and reforms to collect the sensors and other tools that they had at school level. And it was followed by a validation and testing. And we did it gradually, making sure that they are part of the development process, having some weekly meetings to validate and make sure that the system fits on what they want to do and the output that they want to have from the system. So assuming that was them and working system, a book start or started book, depending on where we are we are calling it from. One of the work that we did was this historical data import. We worked with these two province director in order to move to migrate the data that is stored on this system to the DHS2 platform. And based on that we managed to create great dashboards with all core and get us and everything that they want to do at the national level and also not on the national level but also at province and district level. And with this implementation process, I at some moment was there needs to move a bit down to the individual level data because everyone is expecting to deal with individual level data. Unfortunately, I cannot say I can say unfortunately or not necessary but at the education side, differently from the health sector, they are most used to deal with individual level data. Even if it's a paper basis for them is more relevant to have the single line for each student, what's the big difference for the health sector. So it was something new for us because everyone is expecting individual level data to take the teacher attendance and effectiveness to take the student attendance daily and also to implement some social related initiatives. And one of them is this initiative called She Belongs to School that was implemented to guarantee that the young girls, the young human girls are at the same at school and I'm not going out for some social reasons. And because of that, I started a series of apps development, not only to fit these use case, but also the other use case that were coming from the different implementations. So was there, the team started working on some dedicated applications for data capture. So we first we tried to do we did some prototypes in order to go to the field test understand what is the user feedback. And now we are working in order to have a more solid apps that will make sure that we have the users taking for example attendance in a more flexible and interactive way. So this is a screenshot for what is on place and we were planning to do for the attendance. So you can see here in the same page, you can have a summary of what was happening during the week. You can take a single attendance, view less events and take also about attendance if you want to import a data. You have here on the screenshot from the marks perspective, so you can have the list of all students. And for each term, you can take the marks ends in the indication something that is very common is this possibility of doing about promotion. By the end of the year, you want to move the students for one grade to a different one. So you, you, you don't have to do it one by one, you can select those that first and pass them to the next level, and those that are going to remain the same grade, you can keep them. So the idea here is to work together with the different he's in the means of education in order to build these education apps suite in order to improve the data collection and end up today during the expert launch will be doing some demo on the Android app to take attendance and etc. So I think I will stop here just to, yeah, great time. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Audio back. I'm so glad that you had that opportunity to present and also, it's a pity we couldn't hear about the perspectives from Mozambique because I think there's some very unique perspectives there. So I hope we can upload your presentation to the agenda afterwards that people can have access. Yeah. All right, now it will be Ronald Niazia from Save the Children. Hi, Ronald, can you hear us and can we hear you? Yes, I can get you, Sophia. Hi, Sophia. Hello. Sorry for that. We had a savior come in to support and I'm now going to have to drop this presentation grant and go over to Ronald's. But Ronald, really, such a pleasure. Thank you for your patience. Please feel free whilst we get your presentation up for you just to introduce yourself and maybe kick us off. We're very happy to have you here. Thank you. Thank you, Sophia and team. My name is Ronald Niazia, working as information management coordinator with Save the Children on the DHSF education project in collaboration with VSP Uganda and Minister of Education and Sports. Our presentation is about enhancing data use at the grassroots. We are looking at schools and communities through the school status report. We are looking at a case study of schools in Uganda. This can be the next slide. The background in education sector is that education has or generates large volume and variety of data. Education data is quite complex. And this data is picked from schools and institutions, which are the primary source of this data. Whereas we have most of the education management information systems provide limited owner feedback to these schools. So the solution has been partly worked on through the DHSF education. If I'm to give you a snapshot of the education in Uganda, it's being operationalized in four districts. This can be for districts. And in this case, but surely the term later was rolled out in 2022. That is last year. You can see the districts that have been highlighted. And one of the quick gains is that we have managed to have automated feedback to schools through the school status report, which I'll be defining as we move on. So basically, a lot has been done around the area of education with DHSF in Uganda. I'll just go through some of the things that have been achieved. Despite us being implementing the term later in only four districts, there are national data use cases. For example, one of the COVID-19 school-based surveillance national teacher data call. This was as a result of, of course, after COVID, we know most of the teachers were likely affected during COVID. And a government wanted to know the number of teachers in private schools to be able to use partners and support them. Of which DHSF was handy to get this information. Of course, there are also cross-sectorial linkers that we have seen under DHSF with education and health. Cross-sectorial synergies that is vaccination campaign, HPV vaccination and the Dwarming. So you can also see the school-based surveillance. The time dashboard and smart screen in the Minister of Education. But a lot has been done in DHSF, though for today I will concentrate on the integrated term later because the report builds from the term later. What were the objectives of developing this tool and implementing it? One, of course, there was a challenge of data. And of course, one of the objectives was to provide routine data to the districts and Minister of Education for evidence-based planning and reporting. Promote provisional feedback to school through the school's test reports. Pilot cost-effective data collection through the web and Android data entry process at school level. And also support continuous capacity building of education staff on system use. And again, promote data quality through continuous data reviews and data use workshops. Basically, you realize that all these two happen, the schools must submit data. Because if the schools don't submit data, the Minister of Education and the districts will not have the data to use. So as we support the larger local governments to use this data, there is need to support schools or to motivate them to give us this data. Of which one of the motivations should be schools being in position to use this data. Next. So what is the school status report in this regard? In the Ugandan case, this is just a dashboard for school readers and administrators and other stakeholders to basically assess schools' performance to identify areas of improvement. Also to make data-driven decisions at school level. So basically, this is a simple dashboard in DHS2 that is automated when the school submits data. Then that school should be able to view their report. Of course, given the login credentials. So basically that's the school status report. How did we come to this? Of course, we went through a process and one of the first steps we had was to have a few of these schools versus the data management practices. In Uganda, of course, we had the census tools that were being used to collect data to guide ministers of learning and decision making. Though this was a little bit annual and it would take a lot of time. So from that, of course, the user departments felt that they didn't have this routine, they needed routine data. But thinking beyond the user department, we also felt that for the schools to use this data, we need to consult them to see how much or find out how much of this data is used at school. Or which kind of data is used at school. So we had few reviews to schools to assess data management and use practices. Then we identified identification of key data needs at school level. Then through assessing the possible data use instances at school level for integrating data needs into the terminal reporting tool. Of course, after user departments providing their needs, we also integrated the school needs. Then we also had the consultation workshop on appropriateness of the tool for schools. We had situations whereby some of the data that was being pushed by the user departments could not be practically collected at school. So some of those instances came up and of course these engagements helped us to fine-tune the tool so that we can be able to collect whatever data that we needed. Then, finally, we consultatively designed the school status report based on the needs that were available at the moment. The other thing is, of course, when you talk of a school status report, by definition, this is too big. Having clarified that we have complex, or the education data is a little bit complex, we couldn't represent each and everything on this dashboard. So, basically, some of the dashboards that we picked from the terminal tool, some of the indicators that we picked from the terminal tool were enrollment. Of course, this is aggregated by class data and special needs category. Then learners and teachers attendance, efficient ratios. Here we are looking at pupil teacher ratio, pupil stance ratio, pupil textbook ratio. We also looked at number of learners having meals at school because that is one of the drivers of learners to school. Most of the schools it's leading to learners blocking out of school because they are not receiving meals. We also looked at inclusivity where here we look at number of classrooms with access to ramps and also number of learners leaving school. In this case, the minister has a number of reasons that have been proved to cater for learners dropouts. These are the reasons we based on also to develop the school status report under indicator five. So, basically, that was all for the indicators. Sorry, Ronald, I might seem like I'm pushing you along, but we have something you missed because the zoom link was giving you trouble was that there is a national alarm. Going off in Norway, and it's going off in about 20 minutes. So we might just speed up a tiny bit so that we can make sure his indonesia has time to speak. Sorry, thank you. What has worked well one automated school status reports for submission of timely data. This I've talked about it that most of the schools when they submit data, they're able to get feedback automatically. Then 314 school administrators have been trained on data retrieves and use. Then some schools have also discussed status reports to improve on their terminal work plans. So this is something that, as you can see, a team of school administrators was brainstorming on how to develop a terminal work plan based on the school status report. Next. Then the other is schools have registered more learners receiving news following interventions from the school status report. We have also had structures transformed to accommodate learners special needs. Ultimately, school administrators have been trained to enter data school level using both the best and Android platforms as you can see. Basically, of course, people might not see the beauty of this, but in Uganda we have districts that have over 1000 schools. So if you have one district data entrant having to enter those are 1000 forms sometimes challenging. So that's why we also need to promote data input school level for schools that have the capacity and resources. Next. What are the challenges? One of the challenges we've had is the data literacy gap among school administrators. Definitely this is, this is evident. Some can, of course, some don't have even the best skills of browsing through a dashboard and some are not willing to learn. So you have limited capacity in ICT. The digital divide among schools. Digital divide among schools. We have schools in Uganda that even have resources to employ an IT expert as a school, but also we have those that even cannot afford a laptop and desktop. So retirement phobia. The third category of school administrators in Uganda, especially for government schools, are approaching retirement age and they look at some of these things as information overload. After all, they are going to retire. So they are not willing to take in some of these new developments. Then resource constraints, including inadequate funds to facilitate my stakeholder engagements and infrastructure challenges. Next. So maybe we can say if it's okay with you, we can maybe just, if you could highlight for us the key kind of thoughts throughout this recommendations and then we can move it on to his Indonesia. Okay. Recommendations. One, one of the recommendations local governments to blend that education, education that are in the sessions in their meetings with school administrators. Of course, the challenge is that some people can't even, can't even define or they don't know the minimum requirements for maybe the number of learners that are expected in a classroom. So these are things that can be brainstormed in these meetings. The training institutions for school administrators to integrate ICT and data literacy modules in their curriculum. So we think this will be helpful if universities take it on. And we have data literate as school administrators. Then also there's building a hub of database champions at school level, who ultimately mentor other key stakeholders into the best practices. And also design of local method to promote master code engagements for timely decision making. Thank you so much Ronald. Thank you very much. Thanks for your time and apologies for Sophia rushing you. Thank you so much. Great. So then I welcome Poppy to the stage here. We're lucky to have you here in person. Very exciting new use case and whilst Poppy is getting herself ready here, if everyone online and in the room can just stretch very quickly, just stretch your bodies up and do a little side to side. You can get up more. Okay. Right. You have our full attention. So thank you. And if, if the alarm's about to go off, you'll see my face. Yeah. Okay. So I want to share about the expansion implementation in Indonesia. Since we have concern to the health sector. What now we can see how the highest to have a role on the education sector. Here we'd like to see the AC Kulaki, which means that let's go to school. Yeah, developed to discover the socio-economic landscape. By the way, it's a little bit colder here. And here is the condition of our city. But before we are going to discuss and then know about the demographic and geographic condition in Indonesia would like to have the point here, we are not going to discuss how the highest to become a learning platform, but how the highest to support and provide the education environment in Indonesia, especially in Makassar city. Here is Makassar as the capital of such slow see and central activities there where the industrial and government activities happen there and of course it becomes the center or role model for the education and health services. So this is the point. You can say that Makassar as the face of so slow see or even the syllabus or so to island. So let was the island with the population in 2021 it reached up to 1.1 million. The issue come up from the economic sector. We know that and we can see that only around 170,000 total area with the 9000.900 per kilometer population density with uneven distributed wealth or the economic situation. You know, when there are an unbalancing in the economic situation, it will affect another sectors, include education. And here is the condition and I can say that it's not only on 2021 and up to 2022, but it last about years more than 2500 students drop out. And it become concerned from the local government how to improve and enhance it as we know that the human research become the key of a place to grow up and even even to enhance their condition. And yeah, here in the coordination with the regional development planning research and development agency or we call by BAPEDA before we have developed and use the HIS2 to integrate the multi sectoral data, but it's aggregate data base. But today, we use the ESECULACI for develop and track all of the megastar citizens from age 7 to 18, I mean students who drop out from school and their social status. And of course this will support the government to create the exact strategy on budgeting of course planning in the city itself. Let's see how the success story. And then here is the app development. If we are talking about the system development and we are going to say that in 2022, we are starting to develop this app. We can see how it's not that difficult to develop the system. We have seven days whole to develop the system. I mean it's until it's ready to use by the users. The main point here how we can engage or giving the trust with the government so that in the three days consignment we can focus to talk with them about the app, design to the app development and it's taken day. We agreed what are the variables or meta data that will be included system and then the last but not least is about the capacity building itself. We are going to talk about the system ability on the continuity of the system use in the field. We have to give up a constant capacity building to because most of the cases in the field is there are in the capacity building happen there so that the user depend to an administrator and then when the people move so the system move or stop that so that we have concern to the capacity building. And then we are, we were having for the system development on available the instance and then configured the meta data itself and of course set up the users and administrators on the system. Still, we have two kind of application that is a way best app and Android best, we develop into two kind of applications to discover on to answer a lot of the geographical burden or challenges in the field. Okay, here is this is a call a key, the hi s 200 and these are the variables in the systems when where we have identified and of course details, does our status and economical status from each family there. We have identified how the educational facility and of course the government support so that then the stakeholders could identify which, which family or which part of region that couldn't access to education. And of course, we have the web application that is used by the data managers and of course for the stakeholders to see how the data has input to the system and to take a decision from the data input. And here, the, all of the stakeholders can even know how to educate us status of family members, all of the family members and here we can give a point to the number of students at risk of the dropping out, based on the social capacity that our economics status that they have. Okay, on operating this system or this application we have a data but that three main actors that is very important to support on to support on producing the data. The first is data officer, that is, we have around 152 fill it so that around 150 officers to that collected data at village data and conduct the survey to the citizen there. And of course the data administrator at the sub district level to verify so that we can have the data guarantee there. And then, last, but notice we have the data managers at district level that is responsible to manage the data is that so that the stakeholders or the related parties can use the data as well. Yeah, it's just like a basic thing on the information is cycle and this is what happens to with the easy call a key where we have data officer and the collection pros and then process and analysis with the data administrator. And here, the most important thing is how did they take can be used by the stakeholders in order that we want to decrease the number of the dropout student in MacArthur city. Yes, there, these are some thing that can be done by the government, since they can use the data from as equal a key. Here are this. We can see before the highest implementation in Microsoft city started in 2022. And then before that we can see there is a high numbers of dropout students in MacArthur. And when we implement the DHS to is it is a significant decrease numbers of dropout students in the field at about more than 30%. And as you can see, this is what article said when the local government local government can give or contact the best decision, like giving the scholarship to the student in the field. It's around 3000, 3000 scholarship, and it raised amount about 200 from last year. And it can be said that we can have a success full story for the is equal a key DHS to implementation, the verse actually before Microsoft city has developed the system for the right side. But then there are many cups and then trouble then where they have to depend to an administrator and then need to be extract here from the as a problem at as they have to extract the data and then collect it and then manage it where they have to report at 25 each month, but then it would be delayed, because they have to manage it or process it again, and then no user hierarchy and no capacity building so that when the system and the administrators moving the system is stopped. So that here is a collective locked with the is excess of flexible I mean flexible how to develop the data and configure the method that as they need in the field. Of course, we can serve the quick reporting and analysis, and each user has specific role. This are the things and then main focus from the users, the local government to where they have like the stakeholder they can directly access the dashboard or the data that they need and the data only to date the entry app and all of the main users has their has specific role so that the data can be managed well and we of course giving the concern to the capacity building so we can consider the sustainability and here is the key and the capacity building we conduct so all of the actors in the development of the use or the system can know well how to use it. Okay, that's all for me. Thank you. Thank you so much. I feel one thing we've been saying is that the more apps start to come around we need to bring our brains and heads together to make sure that any any unique new apps we can start thinking together as a team so that they we can think about sustainability maintenance of these apps etc. We've gone off with a bang. As promised, there goes the alarm. So thank you to everyone joining online. We will share the slides.