 So, this session, the next two hours, will be reporting on where we have been going on for some years. We have the plenary session in the last annual conference. Then we presented our plans for the coming year. And now we would like to tell and share what we have done the last year and what kind of ambitions we have for the coming years on doing DHS-SUF education. However, looking at cross-sector is a very, very important thing and also local innovation that comes with it, that we need to do. So this picture is from the field work in Uganda. So I'm not getting the next slide here, yes I do. So the whole idea with the project of ours, that we thank you Norad, that Norad has funded is actually to look at DHS-SUF as a generic platform, which we do, but then beyond health and looking at how we can reuse the software features, how we can reuse the IT capacity in the countries and in the region and in the HIST groups. And of course, since we are now talking to the global community, also leverage the global community to look how we can actually support the government and the e-government platform. And today we will talk about education, but we also will talk about water sanitation and talking about education, nutrition is also important. I mean, health programs very often are working with the schools in order to distribute and later of course also vaccinate. So this is what we will talk about today. We will report on the Norad project that will not end because we also got a research project from KIT, which is the GP, we will talk about that under plans and ambitions. But the first that will kick off our DHS-SUF for EMIS and education will be Al Faba from the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education in the Gambia and tell about the Gambia story. Gambia is however a small country, it's very, very important for us because that's had been our living lab where we experiment and try to see what's possible and we will show the rest of the world what's possible. And then we have Prosper Bimbe from his Buganda talking about decentralization of EMIS using the DHS-SUF in Uganda, having somewhat a different approach than the Gambian story, which is very hopped down, very led by the Ministry, the DHS-SUF in Uganda, more decentralized through the districts, that's very, very interesting story. And then we will continue to, I don't see my slides anymore, I hope you do. What happened now? I don't see my slide, but I know my slides and what happened? Sorry for that, taking over my screen, someone. And then we will continue with cross-sector innovations, local innovations and cross-sector. We will have examples from the Uganda, from Uganda, from the Gambia, from Mozambique as well. And we see that cross-sector, as I mentioned, the WASH, the water sanitation, the COVID-19. The importance of liaison with schools, when it comes to vaccine campaigns and stuff, it's very important for the future. So we will also discuss and present innovations when it comes to the COVID-19 work. And then we will end up with plans and ambitions. Teri Enkrut will present that one. Seferino from his Mozambique and Jerry from his Central Africa will present innovations from the Gambia and Mozambique. Sorry, I forgot to say that because they don't put their names often in the presentations. Ending up, we're talking about ambitions and plans. And some of you maybe remember that we plan to arrange a big academy in the Gambia, just after the lockdown hit us in March. That is postponed. We are thinking of doing it as a digital one. If the lockdown continues, more lockdown will apply. And then Teri Enkrut will talk about the research project, the PhD, the work with them, the packages with UNESCO, collaboration with UNICEF. And please, everyone, we would like to revamp the community of practice. All of you have been signing on, I guess, I hope, during this conference. And we can have questions there. We can also keep in touch and discuss further. Okay. And now we'll give the word to Alpha. Alpha, you can then share your screen. Alpha, Ba from the Gambia Ministry of Secondary Education. Like Christian said, we are going to present the Gambia case, particularly for BHIS2 for education in this project in the Gambia. The first important thing, let me, for some of you who may not know Gambia, in the Gambia, we have one set of policy aligned to the SDG4, which is being implemented by two ministries, basic and secondary education ministry, that is the ministry that we are, and we have a high education ministry. And this is the chat about our minister, the commanding secretary, and we have regional directors, head office directors, and you will see at the bottom there on the planning directorate where we have our EMIS unit. But it's very important to say that because of the one set of policy, we also have in the Gambia what we call national EMIS technical team. So the EMIS unit at the Ministry of Basic and the EMIS unit at the Ministry of High Education has a working together to build one EMIS policy for the first time. For a very long time, we have been operating individually, but now with this approach, we are going to have one policy our EMIS will be following from lower level, from the daycare up to the high and tertiary. Now, in terms of the education structure of the Gambia, we, this is the structure for the basic and secondary and the whole sector. You have the ECD and the nursery, where you have three to six, six year olds, and then the lower basic, that is the primary school and the upper basic. Then you have the TVET senior secondary school and the high and tertiary, according to the as a diagram source, just to tell you. Now, what is there is something very important about the Gambia case of EMIS. For a very long time, the country have always had some very key policy objective in the various policies. Every education policy since 1998 has a key focus on education management and education data or school data. So right now, you will see in the various policies, the issue of EMIS is always highlighted. And that's one of the reasons we are always telling as a planning director and a unit and so we are able to fulfill these policies. And this year, this current policy, the 2016-2030, has a specific statement that says that we must have unit individuals ID in the EMIS data. And this is something that we have had over the years. And right now, you could see that we are beginning to start implementing it with this collaboration with DHS and History Africa. But there are additional issues also that are not directly linked to EMIS, but they are very supportive to EMIS due to the development of the technology and time of data. For example, we're talking about monitoring at the local level. And then we're talking about ensuring SDG4 data is fulfilled in this policy. And the issue of digitizing the curriculum is already in this policy. Computers and tablets will be provided from primary schools. And there are a lot of parts of that. EMIS will be decentralized to schools. This is very specific, which means that schools have to have EMIS systems. Teacher register has to be digitized. Student learner identification and the learning assessment data has to be improved. In fact, we have a learning assessment policy. Then we said school report card. These are things that has been mentioned in the policy, not in the form of EMIS. And then you have classroom observation tool. So these are very important policy objectives that are going to be measured right now in this policy. And we have another specific one about unit ID, but we believe these are the ones that are really enabling the environment and that EMIS can benefit from or they can benefit from EMIS as a piggyback. And in addition to that, we have an internet program and then a TV program for the school right now. Now, coming back to the EMIS, just to give you an example, our current EMIS is using aggregate data. We collect data in November every year and when the school opens in September, we collect in November. In February, we have a provisional report and it may be published a year book. And these are our stakeholders in the meeting, the ministry, EMIS staff at head office, regional office. We have planning focal points. We have cluster monitor that are closer to the schools and then the involvement of the head teachers and we have other unit like the ECD, the spatial need unit, inclusive education and non-formal unit supporting us. So this screen is just showing you the kind of data we have. But luckily for us, this aggregate data, we've been able to publish it on a daily, on a yearly basis in May. Since 2014, we've been able to report by the end of May, a whole complete report on the EMIS data we have collected. But by 2016, 17 and 18, our management was even saying that we need to change. So everybody, even us, the EMIS unit, we got a bit of like, we needed to do more than this. So the issue of collecting data for individual was very, was even demanding from, even the internal stakeholders, like people working on EMIS. We're so used to collecting what we are collecting and their action was data all the time. Even when we fill the questionnaire for UIS, there are so many indicators or data that UIS is asking. The current EMIS cannot respond. So the need for shifting is very important. But what do you do with the data for the current data? This is a community report card where we share our data integrated with our additional data in terms of the inputs, in terms of the finances. And then we have a whole report at the end of this year before the school goes to summer holiday. Parents and community are invited in the school to discuss the outcome of the school in terms of learning outcome, in terms of the resources provided. So this school report is now aggregated by, they look at the school level and the report is compared based on how the school did with the other schools in the cluster. How does the school fare with the district? How does the school deal with the whole country and at the regional level? So these are the things that the community can get feedback and know that they are taking more accountability at the local level. That's one of the use. The other thing we use it is the classroom observation tool. Some, this is very important. We have not able to digitize this yet, but we are beginning to ensure that we are able to include it in the EMIS. And we hope by this collaboration with DHS, we'll be able to have this fully integrated. Now, we already had what we call teacher attendance online since 2012 or 2014. We've been struggling with using SMS to collect teacher data for all our public schools using SMS. And this year we have got a new pilot and that will be discussed later in this conference by the participation of DHS. Now, this is an example of our old teacher attendance register looks like. We used to have a SMS data send to a web server and you could see on the screen that you can see the name of the teacher and the school and the message about the teacher. It's a very difficult process. You have to type these numbers with the commas and it has to go in a format so that you can send it. If you miss even a key, it used to be a problem and we spent so much time to manage this. But now we have a new system that we will discuss in a moment because of DHS. Now, the other... We can't hear you now, Alpha. Your voice disappeared after you told the problems with the SMS solution as it was before. Maybe you need to reconnect through your mobile phone using mobile internet. Can you hear me, Alpha? We lost the voice and we lost the internet. This shows that the voluntary... How vulnerable we are for the connections. Now he stopped sharing. He's reconnecting now, I guess. So we need to be patient to get the Gambia in again. Are you there, Alpha? Are you back, Alpha? No, not yet. How long shall we wait? Maybe we bring in Prosper to talk about the Uganda story and then Alpha coming back. Is that okay, Prosper? Are you there, Prosper? Yeah, you are. If you share your slides, we... And then we come back with the rest of the Gambian story afterwards. That's fine. I think Alpha is coming back now. Okay, okay. Somebody need to admit him. Okay, sorry. So let's try again, Alpha. Can you share your screen and continue from the old SMS solution? If we are not able, we do Uganda story first and then you come in after. Can you share your screen now, Alpha? Yeah, I put up the call. You are not sharing your screen? But now we hear you. Please share screen and continue where you and your SMS. Okay, can you give me access to share my screen? Sorry, I didn't know that I was just talking in the air. Oh, okay. But you need to... I mean, then you just share, I think maybe... Maybe Prosper... Can you allow me to share my screen? You are allowed, my friend. Prosper, you have stopped sharing. So, Alpha, you can just click on the sharing again and share. Otherwise... Okay, I'm here. Yeah, can you share? You can share. Yes, I'm here. Otherwise, I can share. Yeah. Okay, so I was... You were on the SMS teacher... You were at the end of the teacher attendance, saying that you will hear more about the new solutions in DHS2 later. Okay? Yes, okay. Then I came to this point. I was talking about the MSPR review or the Gambia MSPR review. Just saying that MSPR is also a very important objective appeal for the African Union education strategy and the wider class regional bloc. And the Gambia MSPR review was reviewed in 2018 by MSPR reviewers from Sierra Leone, Namibia, Bokina Faso, and in the support of ADEA. And they found the MSPR reports and processes are in place and there are some key recommendations and findings on this report that we share. So, this was just telling us that as a country, how we are being. So, another reason why we needed to see from aggregate data to respond to our individual policy so that we can able to meet the new demands of data from in-town learning assessment from UIS from our regional and even from at the country level. We have challenges of what we can share. So, the main purpose of this, one of the team learning from lessons, dealing with illness in the Gambia, we said that we must have data that will respond to the national level. So that we have data individually that will look at the socioeconomic data and then ensure that every child has, is having a UNIX ID. And then we ensure that we are able to collect all the additional data because every now and then in the Gambia, every two years, we used to go and collect a sample size of the background and like we have a store where we have the kids, whether they have breakfast in the morning before they come to work, whether they have television, whether they have books, whether their parent has gone to school. These are data we need every now and then and now we are trying to include part of that in this profile. And again, in terms of the assessment, there is always a problem of linking the current assessment, even the national assessment test we are using is a problem to link it with our data. There is also a problem of incorporating exam data from West African Exam Council. It's always a problem to link it with our image data. So we are ensuring that this new image system will enter all these things is interoperatable from different sources. And again, the student attendance would be something that would be integrated in this big platform. But what is important is if you take school to image data and system to the schools and you don't provide incentive for the head teachers and the school and the local people to do it, they would still perceive your image as something, it's for the planning unit again. But if you provide so that the school headmaster and his teachers can use this system to respond to their own individual need before they leave, before the data leaves their dose, then it will be a good practice for them to keep it and answer it. So we are ensuring that the school administration can use the records for financial management, it can handle their meetings, it can handle their school improvement planning. So all the other administrative issues at the school, this image system should address that first. So when it addresses all these things, this is the sum of that the image need for the national and the regional level. So these are the issues that this is the workaround we want to use to ensure that we increase buying at the local level, because now that it's going to the schools, if you don't have their buying, forget about it. So again, what we are going to do, we ensure that at the central and the regional level, if you put image system everywhere and the regional office and the cluster monitors cannot use it to support what they are doing, again, they will not monitor it at the school level because these are your frontliners. After head office, these are the people who need it. What can they do with the image? They need to do it for teacher posting and placement, national teacher register. There are routine human resource processes that they do when they visit schools and go around. How does this tool help them to so that they can benefit from it? So these are some of the shock absorbers or this incentive we have for every stakeholder. That way, the regional office will buy into the image, the school will buy into it, and then by us at the head office, we would have holistically address every stakeholder's needs going forward. Now, this is why we are now coming with the HIPPS West Africa Partnership and with the UIO, University of Oslo. So we had first discourse with the... This was a very important story because we were working on this and wondering how we can start and eventually we met. And then it becomes a very good relationship because the fact that one of the incentive or one of the motivation is the fact that DHIS was already in the Gambia and in the Ministry of Health for a very long time. So we already have some kind of history and capacities somewhere. And this is very important for the government of the Gambia because government of the Gambia at the Ministry of Information also is trying to make sure that we have staff that can support each other. Now, we are beginning to see a relationship between these two ministries if DHIS works in education whereby we will be able to share resources because incidentally, the HIPPS West Africa, who are the same people supporting health are the same people supporting us. So this is very, very, very cost effective for the initiative. And that's again, when you think of the the bar certificate and bar register which we have started discussing with the Ministry of Health in terms of interoperability in terms of software system, we don't have to have any problem. The only thing we need to do is to enable the two ministries to start talking and agree on the operation but We are hearing you but someone has unmuted and started to take over. In January, February, we have an MOU that we are going to work together based on this and then we needed to ensure that our management to be convinced that we can work together because there is a big question mark about are we really ready to go individual given the rate of change in terms of EMIS and staff and all those capacity issues. Then we needed to say that what about this? So we needed to ask EMIS to customize into DHIS. So we gave the DHIS team some forms and said can we develop this so that we will see and so our managers and we will be convinced that we can go this direction. So we did that in the daily attendance forms and then we made a tracker for each attendance system and by November we had a student research and which will we talk about also. So right now we are doing the there was a tracker for pilot tests and then we had planned for the DHIS academy which Christine mentioned and it will be mentioned later. And then we have the tracker implementation. We had a student tracker which is also collecting the bio data like socioeconomic data for information. Teacher tracker also has bio data qualification work history leave and disciplinary record. This is also linked to the payroll and then we are looking at the class tracker with exam the student and the examination and the assessment the promotional history of the student sorry because now the student can be tracked. You can you can now link the national assessment exam for grade three with the national assessment exam for grade five and maybe later when you do your final exam or assessment things like that. Now what are the achievements? First it is very important to represent that we have high level policy commitment for this. Our minister and the DHIS team were able to meet and then convince and it was agreed. So the commitment and the political risk is high. We even went up to the president office to discuss some of the some of our plans with this. So in the Gambia this is a very big senior management goodwill. Now these are some of the things we have. These are in terms of the architecture maybe we can look at this in more technical later but we have an administrative structure where we have this general information for school. You can see here is the school list if the school has been programmed during the pilot and these are some of the variables we are collecting in terms of administrative structure to support the management. And then you can see now we are moving the school sensors from customizing from aggregate to ensure that it can be put in the platform so that it can be it can still give you what the outcome of you what you want but the content or the input would be completely different in terms of what we are doing. Now the good thing also with the dashboard in terms of the GIS part which is also very important for the sector we have we are able to the GIS tool has that which is a very big incentive for school mapping and school planning school mapping exercise for the planning unit using the ministry the government map or the Gambia map. Now here is some of the some of the example where you can use a draft and so the location of various schools which is very important using the coordinates and it's already tested in the DHS program. We were able to as part of the test a proof of concept we were able to put some some image data first or so so that we say that we can report in terms of in terms of the historical data that we have in the image just to show management so that some of us are convinced that it will be something that we can venture into and then the good news is we started because when we were getting into this relationship with DHS we said one of our biggest challenges was teacher attendance so luckily for us we were able to build a new application shifting from SMS to an app that teachers and head teachers can use now instead of sending SMS message they can select the variable they need and it is so easy now to for them to enter and respond to teacher attendance but by the time it was completed and tested and we started monitoring it school were closed so we but we have very good example even our elderly teachers who used to struggle and refuse to use the SMS are now happily using this application and using the phones so then we have the covered challenges and opportunities some of the challenges we have we had a technical committee that was developed to respond to this high level policy was developed at the Ministry of Education to develop a response strategy but one of the challenges we had during the development of the response strategy when they came to email and access what kind of baseline data we have to develop this really we could not use any data other than the number of students that are at home so we had to go and look at IHS data to integrate household data and that was too old so luckily we had MIX report 2018 which was telling us the proportion of students that have radios at home the proportion of students that have electricity at home no proportion of households not students proportion of households that have radio, tv or internet by districts so we were able to use a proxy indicator from the MIX but EMS was completely left out other than how many school how many students do you have EMS could not inform COVID so this is one of the reasons why EMS need to really respond to resilience and RIX so this and that's why it's important we need to do more in this scenario imagine a whole ministry sit down management want to do something rapidly and the only data you've been collecting all your life is not as useful as it used to be so what was the problem the data we were collecting is in the schools schools are closed we had no other data to inform can we use radio for A for region A can we use tv for region B what can we use who needs what we didn't have that so those are the issues we had so access to and again when we eventually use all the data secondary data to inform our response strategy we said tv and radio there were no way we can monitor what was happening learning monitoring of learning earlier I said classroom observation we were able to monitor class of the sms for teacher attendant but how do you respond how do you monitor who was listening to a radio station who was listening to a tv who did what who use whatsapp the ministry was completely the monitoring and evaluation process of the ministry completely failed it was coupled it couldn't continue monitoring what was happening out there so we are completely confused and now we are reporting opening schools we don't know how much learning we have lost other than counting the number of hours that we have closed the schools how much learning has happened we have no idea so we are going back to the schools nobody can image cannot tell monitoring evaluation cannot tell us other than we have to aim back one very expensive studies that has to start before school that has to start after school open so we go back to school and then start all over we don't even know with what child lost what who remember what who lost what so these are the things that we are confronted now now we hope that there will be DHS academy sometime later and then we will Christine has talked about that and then we hope that we will able to build a resilient and image that will able to be responding to this kind of emergencies and risks and even inform policy managers very well but for example the another thing is we had this year we were able to develop an education simulation model that is also because schools are opening this model can work we now look at education simulation model that advise school reopening based on the aggregate that we have based on the number of classes if you have to reduce your class size from 45 average to 30 how many more classes do you need how many more teachers do you need we can do that how many more max do you need what do how many temperature monitor do you need what are the opening hours how much students will be out of class because of you are forcing them out of class not out of school because they are already in the school but because of social distancing and class reducing the class size they might have to wait come in the morning or in the evening or maybe on an alternate basis we can do that but remember one of the things I am saying about this education model is when the MS team was developing the education model it took us so many hours the capacity to ensure that we can develop a model to respond to issues was a huge challenge for us we have to we have to work with our consultant to support us and but if we didn't have that kind of institutional understanding and capacity is isolated we would we are not going to be able to build education model so we are hoping hopefully MS would have with this intervention as part of it we will have capacity that can respond to developing tools and models that will help the system so thank you very much thank you so much Alpha you really set the scene for the coming in this session and so I'm before I am we will reply to to maybe questions on this UP but then I will call upon Dr Prosper the invasive from the history of Uganda to continue with the decentralist tell about the decentralization approach that the history of Uganda using under ministry in the Uganda over Prosper yeah thank you very much Christine to the organizers of the of this conference and the opportunity for us to share our work in DHS2 for education a new use case outside health we first of all want to appreciate our founders Norak who made this all this possible the University of Australia his team save the children for the work towards the achievements that we are going to share today so in this in Uganda what actually we've tried we come to learn having worked in health for now over DHS2 for health for now over 10 years we just come to learn that the the structure the protein the use is is almost the same so and what this mean means is that moving from health to education we will be very easy for most of the countries that plan to implement DHS2 for babies so to to share our use case for our our work and implementation in Uganda we are looking at the background of how they the image has been working in Uganda typically it has been a centralized and it is still meant a centralized system where that is collected from the from the schools by the national teams entered and married at the national level and so this implementation was and one of the attempts to be able to symbolize that process and this process is quite very costly as you you can imagine right from the process of preparing tools for the collection and the collection itself the entry the cleaning analysis and some nation and then and also this leads to delayed feedback in the lower levels the sub national which would include the districts and the schools and some in some countries they have talked about over a year to be able to get back feedback after the data is collected and this affects so much the lower levels in terms of timely decision-making of course to be able to monitor the progress of the schools to be able to monitor the schools and the and the resources and this process really leaves out the district education team teams who solely are the main beneficiaries of this data so you have this process by passing them and so challenges them with how to use the data when it's out of the data so this is the kind of background and the rationale for why we we patterned with the different organizations to be able to implement MSc the DHHS2 for MSc in Uganda our implementation was basically to be able to pilot with funding from Nolack we was able to pilot was to be able to pilot DHHS2 for MSc and be able to assess the implementation to be able to inform the scale but also to inform also our DHHS2 development support this use case and this was achieved through the process of customization and deployment of DHHS2 platform as an electronic emiss at a district level building the capacity for the ministry of communication and sports plus the districts but your focus to the district education teams to be able to manage the processes around the data collection and processing all in this all in all to be able to decentralize collection capturing validation processing and the districts but also look at the schools if they are able to capture the data and be able to analyze at the school level support analysis we're very key it's always good to collect data and be able to analyze it so that I can inform your decision at the national level and some national reports and finally through the assessment of the user built of the system and also the implementation at the district level so as to be able to see it's the possibilities of scaling and also the possibilities of use at the district level so those are those were our implementation goals and we have basically been able to achieve most of this and we shall share moving forward so in terms of the scope the first initial implementation we've had some kind of faced an overlapping implementation scope the first initial was to pilot and this was to pilot into two districts representing a nabban district and the road district just be able to compare the candidates the benefits and how it's used at this different level so two districts were selected by the Ministry of Education and Sports and we use those two districts as our pilot and just before the the end of the pilot because this is the pilot had raised a lot of interest from the district level we got more support to start the scale starting with two districts and the two districts yielded 720 units so when I talk about when we talk about an administrative unit we are looking at where the data entry and analysis is happening so there are seven units and what is very interesting one of these two districts is one of the districts that has the highest number of schools almost over 6000 schools and it's within the capital and so the success in this scale will really also mean that this will be able to be scaled across the country and again during this same implementation period our scope has moved also to be able to support the education analysis now in nationwide implementation of data list for in this and this is in particular looking to support the Ministry of Health as the plan for reopening of schools is ongoing and we're looking at data being collected from all the districts across the country almost over 40 districts and this data collection is happening through the district and municipal education of officers being able to make phone calls to the schools and get data on enrollment special needs and to hand washing facilities in preparations for reopening as a COVID measure so in the first pilot and the scale the strategy first of all was to get biners as Alfa mentioned it's very it was very key for the Ministry of Education to be able to buy into the DHS2 pilot and the data on the extension and the kicks which is more focusing on the analysis as target will be able to share and also even this COVID response data collection that is ongoing so the Ministry of Education I want to appreciate also the team that is already in attendance from the Ministry of Education and Sports that have joined us they're also the district teams that have also joined us will be in this conference for the support and the work they've done to make all this success so we also had to do orientations and synthesizing the district teams because they are the they were the custodian of the data and we needed to see how to use this data alongside with the patterns within the district and also at the national level we had to study since most of us work from the health background we had to study how the education in this works and this was through the reviews of the previous systems the current system the data collection and also going to the field to be able to see as you can see from the picture down there in one of these the offices of primary school trying to understand how the data is collected analyzed, transmitted and and this at the school level so that would be jointly with the Minister of Education and his Uganda and the paternal same the children then we're back to on the customization of the tools that are used in the data collection and particularly for this we were able to customize the annual census tool which also happens to be almost a generic tool across the developing countries and the tool that you see in our share is almost a tool that is used in Uganda so it also shows that it will be very easy for the country is just like being done for health in Africa when we start using HIS2 for HMS across and this also we are doing at schools being inputed in the system the shapefiles and input be able informed so that could be able to help the district education teams in their planning and management of schools capacity building was also one of the strategies that we have been we brought from training users Minister of Education on how to the system is customized training end users on how to enter the data how to limit how to to analyze it and be able to present it as you can see one of the pictures there that is a regional training participants from the districts trying to log into the system and do hands on training and the other strategy was also around equipping the district teams to be able to implement what was more challenging in most of the of the districts the IT equipment that is that is currently in education offices some of them some district is not existing while some of the districts is really here and there so we can be able to equip them so that implement the the program but on the ground on on on the ground that you know they would be able to maintain this this IT equipment and be able to to replace it in case of NLOS we've had a lot of supports provision both on site and online to be able to further train them and also be able to identify areas where we need some support one of the areas also that is integration of better balance this is the and this particular is the of the requirements for knowledge to be able to understand how we can be able to collaborate on the existing health system to understand to be able to to support our image so um the Uganda which is the general which is general so is another body that keeps the the end the the the end of level examination uh results that to also the body important in our system prosper uh experientially was also one of a lot of keys experience can you come closer to the mic sorry experience sharing was also one of the other here it's key strategies that we we had as you can see the picture there you will see that we had a cross a team across the two but speaking countries which was the Gambia and also the investor post stores the children Christine is in the back there uh listening from experiences from one of our implementing this and and this was an opportunity for for the team in Uganda particularly the Minister of Education to be able to understand and be able to share experiences and key learning reasons of how the implementations are ongoing and and we have also worked very closely with the district health teams so the district health teams have been using DHS to since 2015 so they have acquired a lot of knowledge in terms of you know managing the system data collection and even use so they have been very key in in in in in supporting the districts to the district it helps the district education teams to use DHS and then finally uh one of the strategies we have been looking at was really I I for Kate for the for the DHS to use in EMS of course the different partners in in in this picture we are meeting with and sharing with one with the minister of primary education and also we have taken time to write different proposals both in country to be able to support the scale in other countries and and we've continuously been engaging partners different partners and donors to support the implementation of DHS to for EMS and then periodically we've been sharing our our our work with the with the the permanent secretary the state the state ministers as ministers on what is happening and the like the achievements so far we've been able to see and some of the lessons learned and this basically are very similar to what we we had from Alfa in the Gambia decentralization of of EMS is very is is is is is workable and can be implemented at all levels and we we've been able to to to to get by from the minister of education and different stakeholders and we've put in many partners now interested in voting we have UNICEF also say looking into supporting the districts that they they want to their support their a lot of awareness and willingness to be able to scale this and we hope that in the next year we should be able to we should be able to see the scale to more districts than this that is here so in terms of the innovations and they're quite a number of innovations but what was to share in this academy meaning this conference is the innovation around around around internet connectivity for the district so particularly most of the districts are really struggling with the connectivity and not only for education sector but also for other sectors and this shared internet partnering with the telecom has been really another game changer in terms of the implementation so this has allowed us to be able to maintain the the system up and running may keep in touch with the with the teams in the ground through WhatsApp groups to zoom calls and the internet is serviced and maintained by the telecom at no extra cost and this is something that we really see that the health sector can also pull a leaf and be able to implement this or we can also look in some in some of the districts that this could be an internet that can be shared between the health and the education teams and even almost other departments that are going to be using VHIS too for their MRE would also benefit from this internet in terms of the post cutting sector linkages we had a successful MISOS campaign MISOS and Rubea campaign and particularly for the districts where we were piloting the this linkage of the the DJI school for MIS data really supported the campaign so much and this was based on the fact that the MIS data provides a denominator on the cover for for immunization because the the target population is the children who are enrolled in schools and so with having ready data that allows you to be able to find your target in the different districts is very key we had a from the health sector we we side we had a challenge with you know targets and I think at some point almost what should the target in some of the of the districts because we do not have the right target and the denominator so this in this linked with the position programs can really help in terms of the the target in terms of I did find the the in sites where you are being used as areas where you where immunization is happening even in routine health management outreaches sometimes happen in schools so once the the the clinic in a locality has a good understanding of the children in the area that it can help them to be able to plan for the immunization program the other area of course as I mentioned was working close there with the the district health teams that have used DHIS too for quite a long time the biostaticians at the districts have really been very very key in this implementation that they have been going ahead extra during the trainings during the meetings and even on site helped the education teams to be able to enter the data and analyze it and the challenge of course from the education sector has been lack of IT and statistical persons to be able to manage this data so the nearby closeness of these these district health teams have really helped in that area when we look at the coverage response if everybody knows the schools were much affected because we had the challenge that schools had to be closed as being the most you know at risk areas of the COVID infection so in that process in Uganda the close of the schools affected the landing as as Alfa was mentioning and the government came up with the pattern as with the initiative to be able to dispute homeschooling materials and we need to find that you know in this in the districts where the DHS too for units have been working especially Guru they were able to use the data to be able to estimate to be able to print enough materials for the for the population for the school population in their area and and this has also really really driven us today to the fact that we are now trying to collect education data across the whole country and be able to central have it in the DHS too and so we can be able to share it across with the ministry dashboard that you can see here and they can be able to see our target in terms of you know when the schools open you know the portraits where to monitor in the case of the of the COVID policies and guidelines so this has really helped the quick rapid data collection that is happening from the 140 districts and almost over over half are completing their data collection and we'll be able to have this incorporated and support the minister of education in terms of the opening of schools in terms of the future prospects and plans we do feel energized and motivated by the the data that we have done that this can be scaled out for all the districts and institutions we've been able to come up with the budget that we are we are trying to share with different partners to support we intend to go the Gambia way and try to start testing the people attendance that is tracking the learners and the teachers and the presence their presence performance and time on task we are in those talks with UNICEF and we're also going to extend our talks with World Vision Plan International who have been important and supporting in this to also see how we can be able to support the different districts and then promote the data utilization and finally with the kicks project we do look at the being able to implement the five data framework where we'll be able to now be able to reach the schools the district and be able to have dashboards where data can be discussed this should be made and delivered and done in a real time and finally to conclude if we want to really acknowledge the team members from the Ministry of Education please the dear 13 of them have been worked with the system and have really supported the districts in terms of the data collection the data use and also providing support provision led by Dr. Cleofas the commissioner of basic education and from the history team the team that has been behind the customization the training the online support and also the Ministry of Children team in Uganda that has also been able to advocate and promote the the agencies to use and then finally also to the knowledge our founder to know that our founder who has who has really put a lot of money into this implementation and continue to support even the extension alongside the kicks project and his also team Professor Christine and team who have also been guiding and supporting the implementation and lastly our district education health teams particularly for the pilot district Gullman in my UK then work is on doing the work just joined and lastly to all the district and municipality education officers who are participating in the current data collection for the COVID response thank you very much thank you so much Prosper this was very very interesting and as you audience as you heard we are now entered into the the second item on the agenda meaning the innovation and cross sector experiences and innovations we will continue with Jerry from his Western Central Africa Jerry are you ready to share your screen and yes I am good good good and there we will hear the the solutions and innovations from the Gambia so they're going from Uganda back to Gambia and that's how it has been because these two two implementations has been sharing and experiences and learnings across so over to you Jerry okay thank you very much so we are going to talk about the innovations in the Gambia actually so we're going to talk about two things the daily attendance for teachers and students and then the individual learner or students track so let's talk about the daily attendance I think with the alpha presentation you realize that there was a former system that was around and they were actually sending the data through SMS and they were having a specific format where you should send the data to and the problem was the format was a bit difficult for people to to I mean send data with so you had issues with bad format team and it was difficult for them to compile the data aggregate the data analyze the data so what happened is that we we developed an Android app because they already have a closed user group where they could actually send data or call each other in an environment where the cost is very low or free for the teachers and so with that we actually made sure with the app that we could actually send the data through SMS so they enter the data in the Android app and then they they send the data through SMS you also have in that with this app the possibility to analyze the data locally so they have a chart where they could actually monitor the the presence and absence of teachers and learners and this as they would since this is connected to GHIS too of course they could they also have analysis tools made available to analyze the data through dashboard and and analytics tools so you realize that with this we were able to decentralize the the system and the regions were having the data and they could actually monitor schools this is not sort of a completeness rate of the daily attendance for primary LVEs primary here and this is from GHIS too so for daily attendance the coverage coverage is four out of six regions that are currently using tablets in the app to actually send the data through SMS now region one and region two are supposed to follow they already have Chromebooks and they are going to use internet to enter they will talk about that later on so we have more than 800 public schools now using and it's from urban to rural schools and from lower basic to senior SSC which is primary junior secondary school and senior school the school high school so when it comes to achievement we have 800 tablets that have been procured for the schools and cluster monitors cluster monitors are just in between the districts and the school and they actually monitor the schools and they actually have being a train on how to use or send the data so for example you also have the cluster monitors that actually assist the teachers in sending the data and if they have issues with completeness what happens is that we tell the cluster monitors or they tell the cluster monitors and the cluster monitors go and monitor the ones that are having problems entering the data so they can assist them challenges the first challenge was for now in 2020 was COVID-19 because since the the COVID-19 the first case was declared in in the camp yard they decided to to shut down to go on lockdown and the schools were shut down for a while so there are no more entering data for daily attendance but they are planning to restart so I'm sure it's going to continue when it comes to the management of mobile devices the challenge that we have is that we didn't have an SOP for mobile device management and this is also crucial and we also don't have a fully-fledged MDM that could actually help the third challenge that we have with this was the completeness which was something related to the DHS system but we actually discussed with the developers to see how we can address this issue and it's actually linked to the fact that Saturday and Sundays were part of the denominator for the completeness rate but usually students or learners don't go to school on Saturday or Sundays in the Gambia so let's talk about the track implementation we start Can I interrupt Jerry? Sorry You say MDM what is that? And what? Okay Okay Okay MDM is a mobile device management solution so it's actually a platform that helps you manage the devices that you have so you can actually install application on that from that platform you can install application on your mobile devices with that platform you can even remove or delete data on a device that has been stolen for example so this is a short definition of an MDM And the challenge was that you didn't have it or? Yes, yes We didn't have a full reflect because the MDM that we had was just to install applications on the various devices but it was difficult to actually control the device remotely but in this case we needed to control the device remotely Super, thank you Great, great So the second thing will be the track implementation so we started we're applying to have three trackers one for students one for teachers and one for class classes and first of all we started with the students tracker so it's now implemented in two regions we already developed the students tracker and the teachers tracker the things that are great out are things that we haven't done yet but we are applying to do So what Sorry, sorry Sorry, sorry to interrupt again for the wider audience that are not inside the lingua of DHS2 tracker seems to be a kind of odd naming convention so you could maybe say that it's a register right it's a student register Yes, yes Okay, so this is it is an application that's actually mimic the student register where you could actually enter data for bio you can enter bio data social economic data and also assessment data so you could actually track the students from grade one to to grade 12 and see how it is performing you can we can track the attendance of students and also have information related to social economics this applies to teachers tracker too so you can track teachers you have their bio data you have data related to that qualification we will add the data related to our work history and also information or tracking information regarding their lives and discipline records Okay, so for the tracker implementation coverage we have 11 districts in two regions region one and region two and they have 200 public schools that are currently using the system so you have 231 students that are in role or will be enrolling the student in the system then you have it's actually urban in rural and you have from from the lower basic to the senior secondary education which is primary secondary in high school we for the implementation we be thanks now we had we're able to have 200 Chromebooks we actually printed the questionnaires and we had the bind of the head teachers and they actually sent some some staff three at least that were IT savvy and so they were trained on how to enter the data in the Chromebooks for the schools that were already having a system local system that actually track their student or actually mimic the student register we will import the data into each other so they don't need to enter the data in the system we are actually thinking of a VPN solution where we can interconnect all the schools by internet so with that for example every school can send the data through internet but it's we've been explored it's not implemented yet so we also exploring the an empty end solution achievement so we have trained around 600 teachers and currently this is being used in region one and two of course funded by NORAD and with this now we have enrollment data so we have information regarding Armenian rumors having in various grade by gender by sex and so on and so forth we've been working continuously in supporting and supervising the end users we have support from from his we have support from from the MS team and I mean it's a whole chain of support from from top down so we also trained the MS team on how to maintain and develop the tracker so they could maintain their tracker and I mean this was a joint develop development they worked with us in developing this tracker together so these are screenshots of a dashboard in the system where we get the data from the tracker for the individual so this is individual data that has been aggregated the same second screenshot of it and then we go to the challenges so due to COVID due to the lockdown we this data entry process slowed down because officially detention has stopped it's actually some of the teachers or staff since they have the Chromebooks and they can enter the data offline they continued entering the data willingly and sometimes the MS team goes and and synchronize the data because with the Chromebooks you can actually enter the data offline that was one thing we are actually planning to use the 200 Chromebooks to enroll all the learners in the in the country so we actually capitalized on the capacity that has been built throughout these months regarding entering the data in the system to actually enroll everyone in the system we like I said we need a fully flagged MDM to to actually monitor our devices when it comes to Chromebooks or tablets and we realized when we're implementing that some of the school were not having admission numbers but we needed an ID for students so we actually designed our general design an ID scheme that could be coupled with pictures or photos of students to avoid duplicates in the future workload on teachers currently they're actually enrolling everyone from one grade to another and it's a lot of work for now but this will be reduced along the line because teachers who now after the end of the year if everybody's enrolled they can they'll only enroll new comments so it should be to be limited they will have this will be reduced and we also had system limitations in DHIS2 that we actually tried to mitigate we had work around it and we also some of them we addressed it to the to the the developers thing so that it should be solving in a couple of months so thank you very much over thank you Jerry hang on hang on hang on people are posting questions in the chat we will encourage you to to move over to the community of practice for the for the DHIS2 for Education because then we can continue to discuss however I think we can take time for a couple of questions Jerry if you're ready yes can we have access to the demo yes yes of course you can have access to the demo so please check out our on the DHIS2.org you can have an education or the COP we will I think do those global resources are and all the question was something to do with a unique idea and when people are switching schools can you comment a little bit on that okay so the unique idea yes it's what we did was going to be a unique idea even if you're switching schools you will still have the same unique idea so it's a concatenation of year a random number school code and what we make sure is that this unique idea will be made available I mean it will be the same for all the students in the health information the education information system whereby if you go to another school we can just look for that ID and that's all when you go to another school you'll be enrolled using that same learners ID super and then we have one question from Abdumalik to to alpha alpha are you ready it was the question about teaching track teacher tracker and where do you actually also track the number of lessons taught by the teacher as attended by the learners every day monthly are you there I'll start to answer yes I'm here I think that's a very important question because the classroom observation tool is actually geared towards answering we improve the learning outcomes because we realize that many our grade three students there's a lot of students that are failing nearly half of the student unable to meet the national assessment test so there was a need or what what can we do is like let's go back and work on the what is happening and the classroom and this classroom observation tool for a start was a pilot a 20 percent of Soviet that still that looks at so vice or a teacher goes into a classroom who is not in that school and observe the classroom in town in the area of time on tax the first five minutes in town what how did the teacher is delivering the lessons and presentation of the lesson thank you and there is one more question and how about the classroom management of the teacher so it's about that so actually we have a report at the end of the year that report comes back to the standard and quality the unit and they use it for the action for for from the policy set from the policy point of view but going forward with EMS we are hoping that we will able to integrate this classroom observation tool as far of the team so that the data that is coming would not be completely different from the data that EMS is monitoring because at the end of the day we have to manage the data of the classroom observation tool too thank you super um and it's one more question I think that we need to move on to Seferino however it's um it's a question I don't see who from whom is the system generating the idea or are you using national idea so this is both for Jerry and Alpha I guess yeah I can just say a little bit about that the issue of the ID is something that we hope would be generated from the the day the student is being admitted or come with the you know entering the class the first day the day you come with your parent to start so we are hoping that the admission books and the admission register that are currently in the school would have to be adjusted there will be a new one whereby this is recorded and then it is transferred into the system and this ID would be generated automatically so in another word every school will have their series of numbers and when a student move from one school to another you move with that ID and in term of uh EMS it will help us manage the number of transfers and the people who have exit the system and eventually you will able to track who who who has moved start which school and eventually how they have been moving from meeting the country and across the the region so these are the things that we are doing and luckily we the DHS support has been able to provide a randomly generated number which was a big headache for us because we were wondering how can we manage duplicates but with uh luckily we had that solved now teachers can generate randomly numbers and there is the chances of another number generated like that is very slim which is a big bonus for us now our job is to ensure that there is a lot of capacity in terms of ensuring there is no duplicate and this can be can be scaled thank you okay thank you I think we now move on we see whether we have any remaining time for more questions otherwise please move over to the COP so we can keep in touch for these great jobs super presentation for all of you Jerry, Prosper and Alpha we are going now to Mozambique going going south are you ready Seferino to share your script over Seferino yes he's ready hello good afternoon maybe maybe you put it in the presentation mode or maybe because now we can see two slides please okay but there is something to duplicate to something ah cool super okay good afternoon everybody my name is Seferin Solzhen and I'm from the East Mozambique team so I will be sharing the experience that we have with the WASH project that we are implementing here in Mozambique and also trying to also to see how what are the plans with regard to the expansion of the the project that came as output or by trick triggered by the COVID pandemic so under the the the the the reiterate of water and sanitation we are the government is implementing the WASH program in the communities in the 11 provinces of Mozambique and the actual the data currently has been or it has been captured using ODK platform and because of the lack or the challenge that we are facing with the visualization of the the the information or analysis overall analysis the DHHIS was selected as a platform to be used to strengthen the process the management process of the WASH data and the University of Oslo as approached by UNICEF to support the country and then at that point we came in and then we are currently in the process of implementation of that for the project by where there is interoperability data coming from the DHHIS from ODK and then being routed into DHHIS 2 and then we have now these are the output some of visuals that can be generated from the system where the analysis that you can do so that we as you see there are different type of data from water systems and pumps to sanitation systems as well there is a sanitation in the community that is registered there are some graduation process that also has been implemented to see with some community that I let it then they follow some specific protocols where by hand they can be they can graduate as defecation free so that all this protocol the data is captured using the ODK I mentioned but now we are replicating this process into DHHIS 2 make sure that there is a comprehensive the process and then all these validation approval can be done directly or internal using the DHHIS 2 platform of course or with the data coming from ODK with the COVID pandemic so there is there was as everyone knows the schools we are closed then slowly with the the process and then the schools in order for the schools to open there is a focus on the WASH program and now UNICEF is working with the with the department or the unit within the means of education or together with the director of water and sanitation in order to include within the system some processes that can highlight that they they will get the information from each the school special with regard to the situation in the schools previously the information was on like very very few indicators they didn't have the situation for the school it was taken in in overall from the whole community from the schools from the the community but now that they what they want they want the information from each of these schools to be able to monitor to to know what the situation of that if there is a possibility of for example intervening having some actions there's a need of doing doing that so currently there is a kind of pushing these interventions community folks interventions try to embrace the kind of wide approach with a special focus on on schools as part of this present we start doing assessment of the image in order to see whether the Minister of Education has a system that could be used to to to capture the information related to wash and others we identified that there is of course there is a recognition from the the Minister of Education that health, nutrition, water, sanitation that that is essential for effective learning but and now also that as an example of that there is a program that they call PRONIA which is the School of Nutrition that there are some selected school that they receive those support from the Ministry which is one of the ideas to retain the students at school and some of these students that it's of course they are from the non-vulnerable the families so one of the the idea with this program is to see how they can get the school the students to come and then to reduce the dropouts so when we are we looked at that we found that there are some challenges for example with the with the education system with the EMEs especially for example the the annual sensors that for example colleague presented from the Gambia the the announcement for example that they have the system that is doing that here in Mozambique this is done manually the attendance registration also done manually and in overall they don't have the means of help the education does not have comprehensive or functional it means that the monitor wash and other key indicated for example that these school sensors attendance there's no comprehensive or integrated system that does does that so as output for this assessment that we have done with the plan now is to expand the wish program to cover the some of the the goals that were set by the minutes of education especially with the hygiene sanitation and nutrition and also to support the expansion of the CNS DHS which is the the platform that is now operational under the the the director of water and sanitation which is not in the midst of education so the idea is to expand that to cover to to also to reach out and then get some information from schools and it supports the development of an integrated platform that will monitor all the areas and services in the school in collaboration with the communities and other partners and at the end also focus on the monitoring performance of schools and teachers from primary and secondary schools with a special focus on OVCs we have to identify some of the NGOs and community organizations that are working with OVCs and then one of the the their target is to see also the the similar that I mentioned here which has as a target to to look at it is vulnerable children to keep them at schools and provide some subsidies for example education fees so that the idea now is to to expand to have you within this integrated system this process of monitoring them and then in order to make sure that they they they they they continue at school they don't drop out if there is a dropout at least they they don't show at the school that they the process that goes there and then I identify them find out the reason why they they they they they are not showing at school and then trying to talk with the guardians and and their parents for the make sure that they return at school and then they attend so that's the the the idea and with that as I've end my presentation thank you very much thank you Seferino very very good interesting and good presentation to look into the potential of integrating the various functionalities and having schools at the center and I really think that can make a difference for as you mentioned for the voluntary pupils but also to to manage both the health services vaccine services water and sanitation services and the educational data services from the school level that's very cool you have gotten some questions but I think we take them after Knut Tarje Tarje it's you you can then share your your slides and now we're entering into the plans and ambitions and we will hopefully stay on because hopefully we have time for some more questions and discussions afterwards over Tarje can you hear me can can great and if you put it on screen mode it's better I will ah you well good good yes so Knut and I we have a few slides on plans and ambitions moving forward with this I'll jump right to it I actually have only one slide for myself and the rest is for Knut I'll spend a few moments just to reflect on this important aspect with with HISP I mean I don't think DHS2 and HISP would be anywhere near where it is today without the massive you know work of master students and PhD students over two decades and I think that's that's kind of a key characteristic both in the institutional memory and in terms of the knowledge generation that drives this whole ecosystem around DHS2 so and that's been a missing component so far that for the first year we have not had a huge budget on research but we have now complementary funding to the NORAD funding that is focused more on the implementation and the activities you just heard about we also have now funding through IDRC the mechanism is called KIX knowledge innovation exchange and they're funding a few projects that are working with data systems in the education space and we are one of the lucky ones to receive funding for that and in relation to this we have four starting PhDs just now and they will focus on different thematic areas for instance from what the Uganda story you heard about with the district information use and the focus on empowering districts that goes way back to the roots of the whole HISP endeavor that's how it started in South Africa as well you know strengthening strict analytical capacity and then building slowly that install base of or institutionalizing the system from the bottom up and that's I think the Unagana case a very good example of and then we are lucky to have one PhD to follow and document and explore what are the challenges and possibilities around this in the Uganda and the Gambia as you heard it's a very ambitious move towards individual records and this big data shifts in education that we are now being a part of and so again that also needs documentation and study to follow it and taking on the the real world problem and trying to look for you know academic literature that can inform our approach to solving some of these challenges of identification you know maintenance of the system it's a huge endeavor to maintain an individual record system over years both in health and education so that's that's a very sophisticated system that needs to be in place to maintain these efforts Togo we are still recruiting PhD candidate there and then we are also you know following this with more holistic perspective how can this you know platform that that we have built out of health accommodate needs in education and across countries and how can we cross fertilize both between sectors and countries and all of this has been built around an action research methodology where you know the researcher takes the perspective and the problem at the real world problem of local stakeholders that's the starting point and then try to inject existing theories and knowledge but also to generate new theories and knowledge to address the the actual problems and then again we also have master students they're involved in more confindence focus projects one of them is this school report card in the Gambia where I'm supervising two students right now who are trying to technically look at how we can build an app for for the trust to to to build on what they already have the the information requirements and indicators that they already have but to build that in a digital format I think that's what I wanted to say and just to say that we're very happy to bring in this research component into this whole endeavor into education and to look at the synergies between health and education over the next three years and we of course always do that but we are very happy to get funded as well absolutely can you continue please yes idea can you go to the next slide please yes yes so just to continue on this we are very thankful for the excellent support from NORAD over many many years on the health side and very excited about this sort of new initiative that's been going on for well close to two years now on the education side and we see that there are a lot of synergies and that is also what NORAD sees so we are right now talking to NORAD about how to continue this and how to scale it up we had a very small pilot so far that has really focused on leveraging the things that are already in place on in terms of system functionality and the platform and we've seen that already as you has been presented this this morning that a lot can be achieved with what is already there but with a longer term funding for education we will expand on the functionality that is more targeted to the needs of the education sector especially when it comes to what Tadia just highlighted the needs for to focus on individual learners as as is also well backed up with the SDG4 so we really want to engage at the school level but also at the teacher level at the class level and for each learner so we will continue as alpha presented this morning to expand this effort enrolling and registering data for each student in the Gambia we also really want to scale up the efforts in Uganda and we hope to do that with partners as Prosper highlighted we think that we can do something quite similar in Togo of course that is a different educational tradition and the French Franco sphere if you will so we will have to do translations obviously but also the way that the school system is organized is slightly different but the an interesting thing about the Gambia and Togo is that they are both in West Africa and as such there are regional bodies that we know like ECOWAS that we hope to work with and then very interestingly Mozambique has been presented that will also be part of the this three-year new or continued contract we also hope to expand to another country or maybe even two it depends a bit and we were looking at very interesting candidates both in Africa and in Asia and some of them are mentioned here so very very importantly what we have achieved I think on the health side is has been very dependent on partnerships not just with NORAD but also with WHO and UNICEF and PEPFAR and other very key players and we had the announcement of CDC this week so on the in the education side the sort of corresponding major player of convening convening power and focus on standards and data is of course UNESCO we're very happy to work with the UNESCO Institute of Statistics on this kicks project and we really hope even go beyond that but that is a very good start and it was a little bit delayed because of COVID but we're going full speed ahead now in this collaboration similarly we already have a long-term agreement with UNICEF so we hope to leverage that when it comes to the education as well one very interesting long-term effort that UNICEF is engaging in as this data must speak which is also present in several of the countries where we work in addition to the ones the partners that are mentioned on this slide we really hope to engage with other regional bodies such as the African Union and Adea which is Pan-Africa of course the global partnership for education which is already behind the kicks initiative and the World Bank which also is is a major major player in this space so in short what we hope to do and we see this current session as part of is to build a strong community of practice around use of the DHS2 platform on the education side as well as health and also jointly across the sectors so as Kristin mentioned initially we think we think there is considerable potential for using DHS2 as a more common e-government platform so the last slide maybe please tell you yeah that one yes so just want to highlight that we know that there is a lot of excellent work of course already in any country we go to and there is also a lot of local innovation that we've already seen in this pandemic period and prior to that we hope to bring all those excellent initiatives into make it easy to bring them into the DHS2 platform yesterday there were several sessions on how to create extensions of the platform and we very firmly believe that DHS2 can serve as a backbone for many of these initiatives and help them scale both within countries and between countries regionally and globally and then I will leave some time for questioning so we just end with some links to the demo and to our the website as well as as the education or more academic resources so those three links I think it will also post them in the chat and of course this this presentation will also be available on the on the schedule yeah on the agenda so thank you very much and we hope for an interesting discussion thank you so much Knut and Terje to wrap it up with the the call for all our great partners to bring it on to be make us enable the DHS2 to be a platform for education as we have been able to do with the health sector for the last 20 years so we our ambitions are high and big and we would like to to turn the DHS2 into a platform for use for managing the information systems for education in in large together with partners so please you can just reach out to us us is the one that I've talked and many others we have some questions and we have time for it I don't know whether we should maybe take the question I mean the software lead the large everyone has have made one question which could go a little bit back to the the android and the chromebook solution I could mention it so you can actually regarding the chromebook solution did you write an android app which was installed at the chromebook what was the experience with this app any problem related to missing internet access and so forth meaning did we have any offline support and stuff and then doctor doctor Adam Kossi from from his business at african having a doctor degree from from the hisp and you are answering Adam do you want to answer in public here are you there and then over to Adam if Adam must if Adam is not there I can read out and maybe Jerry can ship in if if if sorry the chromebook are using the regular dhs2 android app however an sms app was developed to allow school using the their phones to report daily attendance thing so that was the question so please move over to the COP Alfa you had some questions maybe you can do it or leave we have time for that one you have two different questions sorry I was struggling with my mic I was not able to and now it's okay thanks okay so please continue them you heard me if you have anything else to add Adam I think I replied to the question on in the community website yeah yeah yeah good so then alpha do you do you want to to to read your your your questions allowed if you're there and if you can unmute if not I can read it up you know hello yeah over I was just thinking that is important that we as government get the support of the international partners even I had the collaboration with international partners and I said this sound like Paris the partnership in in in statistics for the 24th century so I was saying we are struggling at the local level and maybe you international partners DHS NORAD UIS and now we're talking about additional partners on the on the table UIS are there you might underestimate the influence you have in making our government to respond to this kind of interoperate operability in in the image there is a case for the Gambia the chances are we might able to build the tool but how do we bring the health sector on board to answer if it is functional we need a huge commitment from the health sector to come on board and we need WHO we need you guys to come together and ensure that there is a concerted objective from you we can bring and then together locally and internationally we can ensure that it is done so please don't leave it only with us we think you guys have a great opportunity to make sure this happen so the other question I had was for touch he mentioned the ecosystem the ecosystem for me here is building one tool and eventually giving it giving your back as a technician doesn't make so it works five years later you need experts you need support you need technicians how do we and so that we extend the ecosystem like we discussed in our plant and so that universities in the local area in Africa in Senegal or in Gambia or Liberia can provide support for this again we think NORAD and all the support can can help so that we begin to have the kind of PhD and masters you are doing in the UIO some limited of that maybe a diploma in EMS can be done in one of these African universities so that we can have beginning to have some kind of expertise around this in the future because some of us are going to retire from this and then there will be a challenge for EMS thank you Tariq, do you want to respond? I could although we could obviously discuss this ecosystem metaphor in many ways I think it applies both at the country level like you say and internationally I mean around capacity building but very simply when I mentioned ecosystem I think I thought about it in this software platform sense that you have a technical core but that alone is not very helpful you need a whole ecosystem of capacity implementation experts like all the HISP groups and you know all the knowledge academies everything that is built around it for this to work in any particular setting and for it to be customized and adapted then and built innovations on top of so that for me is you know the HISP UIO perspective of an ecosystem but then from a country perspective you're also governing an ecosystem of you know government public sector services and those need also to be seen as one ecosystem like you say how can you collaborate between the different government departments and even within education department alone you will have different or education sector alone you have different departments and different you know ownership of data and so on so there many ways we can pull that metaphor but I think for us it's very important to recognize the importance of this long-term university collaboration and the capacity building around the HISP UIO which makes it a very agile ecosystem that can respond to COVID-19 but also build a lot of exciting innovations and for me it's very important to see this transference now that we have this large ecosystem that is what makes us able to move into education and provide support and services and build on the in-country capacities everywhere to leverage this also in the education sector that's it for me on ecosystem thank you thank you thank you I'm trying to get the slide up so you can all read the all the links and stuff but we have troubles with that one okay so we can rather go to them to the sorry I don't even see the chat anymore there is one chat please so there's one chat more from from UIS actually when we and maybe this is for alpha I don't know when we make it to health and education what is the entry point this is the school this is the health center and how to share same idea for both and again the question is is this system generated ideas that that question we had earlier alpha maybe you would like to answer that one or yeah I think the the entry point should be from the I'm assuming that everything is now working between health and education the entry point should be from health so it's like from bad to from the from bad to the the grief so we have a child born in the in the health center in a local community and the data is registered and then education have the data and is automatically monitored so we keep looking at this child year one, year two according to the education policy in Uganda the child is year three then we just go until the family remember we already have the other ID system we inform the family oh there is Mr Alphaba he should come to class it's today is on the September 28th we didn't see him then we can monitor our out of schools if he goes and you know these are the issues and if the nutritional component of it would be coming from as a child and the more we sit in the hospital that record is coming so when we want to measure readiness to learn which is an SDG4 indicator it will be easy for the country to report overlapping indicators that are nutritional that are physical issues inclusive education issues out of school issues and all those things so the starting point should be held if it works very well but the fact that there is nothing right now and the biggest advocate and the driver for this is IMS we are beginning to say that we start it at the education department working with all the partners so that we can eventually with the hindsight that health will come on board and then we don't have to do a lot of groundwork a lot of mechanical work when they come on board but definitely that's the thinking right now thank you Alfa I want to read one we need to to stop very soon because they need the room to prepare for the next session in a couple of minutes but I would like to do them the question from Claude in many countries external funding has been key to sustainability purpose is there an advocacy plan to sensitize the government to start investing into IMS and is the software free a given free to countries and of course the software is open source given free Newton has also answered that of course they need the cost training the support the TAs the computers and so forth but it's the advocacy for for the government that's what we do by sharing the good examples and then maybe I should use the couple of last minutes to thank everyone there is a pretty intense project group behind this work that you have been heard a little bit about today we will we will announce an academy maybe we do depending on the covid situation of course where we will share even more stories and best practices and invite more partners to present in either do it digitally or we are continuing if we can see the flights that are moving around in the air to have it in the Gambia as planned and then we postpone it for maybe January or February so so keep in touch move over to the COP I hope we can have a vibrant and active community of practice discussion that we really need to that we can keep in touch and share good examples and inspire each other so my my last word will be to thank everyone that have attended I think this has been a very very super example of of of sharing of experiences and then please please visit the community of practice please visit our our our venues that we will post there the demo link and everything and also our slides will be posted on the community of practice as well so thank you so much and we will end this session and the new session will start