 Hello everyone. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. My name is Sophia Koziakis. I'm the EMIS project manager, so EMIS standing for Education Management Information Systems. I'm just one person in a beautiful team of people who are looking into the education sector, trying to learn what we can from the health sector while keeping our eyes very wide open about the unique intricacies of how children and youth are learning in schools and beyond. So that's the reason why I wanted to put this picture up for us before we kick off our session. Just to remember, to remind ourselves that for the majority of children, adolescents and youth across the world, the journey to reach to the top, to lead a life that you have reason to value, whatever that might mean for you as an individual and where you live, is not an easy journey. It's a big uphill climb. And for many, many children and youth, one small drop, one small blip can mean that they will never come back to school. And even though we have been working for many years to ensure we have children in seats and classrooms, we are now learning that they are not learning. So by the age of 10, we have many, many, many learners that aren't able to read and understand a simple text. So it's just a reminder to us of why we're doing this, why DHIS2 is exploring. And when I say DHIS2 for Education, and we really should say DHIS2 and the HISP network for Education, because it really takes a village. So a very brief glance, I'm not going to spend too much time here because you'll get the slides because we have a beautiful lineup of folks who are going to be speaking today. But just to give you a snapshot of the six partner countries we currently are working with, we have gone national scale with Treka and aggregates in the Gambia, many learning still with Treka. We have gone national scale with the Kingdom of Eswatini. We are working in Togo, Uganda and Mozambique as well as Sri Lanka with much, much growing interest which Christine will speak to at the end of this presentation and we'll go into more detail in our parallel session. So we are looking at finding that key of being able to get data into the hands of the decentralized, that middle tier decentralized district level, even trying to see if we can go further down to school level to those headteachers and to their school inspectors. We're trying to understand equity, inclusion, quality through the tracking. We asked yesterday why are we doing this Treka in health? We're trying to learn from you and think the same. We are very importantly not coming into replace systems where they work, where capacity has been built over many years. As CHIS too, what I love is that we can come in and we can play nice with existing systems and maybe find a hole that that system cannot fill where we can maybe complement. We are so lucky to be reusing all the software features of DHIS too, maybe doing a tweak here and there and there and asking very nicely. We have so much capacity from the HIST network to help us reuse all that skill that is in country. It is in region. Oslo doesn't often fly to our different partner countries and then very importantly something that's building beautifully is university collaborations, our associate professors, our supervisors, et cetera and the research team are really working hard at this. So are the HIST groups and we have a beautiful team of amazing PhD and master students. I'm proud. I want to pass it over to a very, very wonderful person, Sidi Jalo. He is in the EMS team at the Ministry of Education in the Gambia and he's also a PhD candidate. So we are really lucky to have you here in Oslo, Sidi. Welcome. Okay. So thank you very much Sophia for the introduction. As you as you can realize, this should be a piece of cake for me as a educationist and also as a researcher on EMS. But this is one of the hardest presentations for me to make because standing in front of health and convincing them that education needs a share of the funding is not exactly easy. But that's exactly what I'm coming to do. So let's start by imagining if as health officers as stakeholders in our various disciplines, if the educational level of the population that we are dealing with is a little bit increased. So how easier it would be for us when we are dealing with them? I assume it's going to be a lot less time spent with them because there's a little bit of, there's actually a lot of research that has gone into linking education with a positive correlation with the health of population. So the more educated the population is, the more that they are likely to seek preventive care instead of creative care, if that is the right word to use. So we have also in terms of last conference and this conference, there's a lot of talk of cross-sectoral linkages and stuff. So in education itself, there's a lot of possibilities for health and education to collaborate when the education system is up and running. We have examples where health, we are using education infrastructures or education institutions to conduct vaccine tests and stuff. But in the Gambia, that was during COVID, but in the Gambia at the moment where I've come from, we have, I'm talking about as recently as last week, we have the Ministry of Health itself leveraging education structures to try to get outreach programs to children that are in the communities, to parents that are in the communities, because in our schools, we have modest clubs, we have PTA associations, we have all of these associations that are really connected to the schools. So the Ministry of Health is leveraging these structures now to try to get to the parents of these children that are in the school. And for this specific program, I'm talking about it's not even trying to look at the population that the education was trying to capture. They were looking at for a resignation program of the infants that was even out of the population domain of education. So this just how shows how walking with the Ministry of Health and education together could be very, very influential. And the target group of education is from three years old all the way to 19 years old. And there's a big chunk of the health target population too, I believe. And with the goal of education is to make sure that every child is enrolled, universal education, every child is enrolled in the school. And I think that's going to centralize most of the target population of the health in schools. So when it's time for vaccination programs, when it's time for immunization programs, instead of targeting the schools, instead of targeting the community story, you can target the schools themselves where a bunch of the population of those vaccination programs are, for example, cervical cancer, immunization for young adults, especially the girls and so forth, it can be targeted at the schools instead of going to the communities, which is a much more difficult and expensive. So with this, I believe, achieving universal education, making sure that every child goes to school is a topic for everyone, including the health personnel. So what education has been, despite this importance, has been forgotten for some while. The right to education was specified in 1948, but it was not up till the years leading up to 1990 towards the Juneteenth conference, where most of the education stakeholders were met and start talking about, we need to start to make this a reality. That was the time that they started thinking about how are we going to make sure that every child goes to school? Then there was this education for all network framework, a framework that tried to make sure that every child achieves, gets free and compensated education from the government. And starting from those years, people started to talk about how are we going to make sure that we plan, in terms of policy, in terms of resource distributions, and also we monitor whether we are achieving our targets. That's why Momentum started to build around this thing that we call MS. So in summary, this is one of the most comprehensive definitions we have of MS. So in terms of usage, it's to collect, integrate like most health information systems and the specific purpose is mostly to support decision making and policy planning and resource distribution and stuff. And the components, as usual, is not sociotechnical in nature. It has people, technology, models, methods and all stuff integrated to make sure that it's not only the system of technology that we are talking about. So in terms of politics, what makes a really good MS is it has to be comprehensive in the data that's collected, it has to be integrated, it has to be reliable, it has to be unambiguous, and it has to be timely, most importantly, because most of our education system at the moment, you collect data at the beginning of an academic year, but it's not ready until the end of the academic year when it's not useful, then you start the next academic year with data of the previous year. So I don't know how you can make accommodations with that. So that's presented a lot of problems. And some of the key stakeholders in education are the teachers, the parents, and the community in the education. So these are very key. So I mentioned the communities, I mentioned the PTS, I mentioned the village development committees who are key in education. So trisional education data talks areas like students, data, and teacher data, infrastructure data, facility data, water and sanitation data, resources, finance, and the kind of indicators that we look at in this traditional MS is to look at access indicators, how children are coming into the school. We talk about the integrates, how many of the new ones that are being born are being absorbed into the system. We talk about growth enrollment rates, we talk about integrates also and new entrants integrate ones. Then we talk about also have equity indicators that we also measure, the share of gas, that's one, and the parity impacts across all the other indicators. Then we have input indicators that is in terms of the resources that the central government, the ministry, and everyone is putting into the education system. So we have the teachers that are there, the books that are there, the furniture that is in this post, and all that input indicators that are crucial in learning. Then in terms of output, we look at retention, we look at transition, how are children moving from one level to another. And most importantly, completion rate, how much of the students that are coming in are going out because that's one of the coming out at the other end because that's one of the biggest measurements of indicators in education. So let's fast forward from the 1990s when we had this kind of design for MS and the thinking around MS was mostly this area. But the most of education systems at the moment is configured and are still thinking the same way. But the rules have changed, and the games have changed because we are now presented with many problems that we need to shift somehow to try to address. Because in many of our countries, including Gambia, I'm using the Gambia because one, that's where I come from obviously, but two, because on average, most of our indicators are average compared to other regions in the sub region. So we have established schools everywhere. So we have a policy that says two kilometers for every lower basic school in the country. So and we have done that since in the 90s and we have monitored that and we have made sure that there are schools everywhere. But as a result, we have our GR is more than 100%. That means technically we have created space for every child that needs to be in the school at the LB level. But our net enrollment rate, that is the actual population that should be in school is only 80%. That means one out of five that we need to target are not in school at the moment. And how can we find them? This existing system cannot let us know because we need to individually identify them. We need to know where they are. Why are they not going to school? Then we can bring them on board. And at the end of the policy period from 2005, from 2000 to 2015 coincided with the MDGs. And the MDGs also was pushing its way behind trying to improve access. Now in its report, it has shared with us that even though we have created all the schools, but there were challenges in terms of the distribution. Many of the girls by, for instance, are suffering more from the dropout. Dropout is more of the girls than the rest. And then we have the teacher supply in terms of the rural or rural distribution. Teachers are mostly considered in the lower and not in the upper section. And then we have the special needs that are mostly left out in planning. And these are people that we really need to focus on. So to drive this, we need to make sure that we look at another kind of MS that can help us answer this question, help us solve these questions. And that is why we are looking to move away from the MDG team of access to the SDGs teams of learning to collect demographic data, to collect assessment data, to look for data, not just to collect it, but for practice and action, to look instead of the the centralized approach of collecting data from policy monitoring and planning. Now we should use this approach where data is used to make sure we stop the children that are coming, that are dropping out and improve attendance and performance. And for this, we need to go down to individual data and to make sure that data is used more on a routine nature. So, but as one of the biggest challenges in doing this is MS as a whole lacks what we call turnkey systems, systems that can help us do this. Most of our systems are standalone. They don't integrate, you know, they don't be flexible and you know, seen examples on that and there's limited research as a whole in terms of MS. But that is why we are in DHIS too here today. So my colleague would, you know, talk about exactly what opportunities DHIS who has presented us in education. So thank you very much. Thank you very much, Sidi. My name is Monika Amuha. I'm a PhD student still researching about MS. And so like Sidi has said, I think we are moving, we are really learning, trying to learn from health what has happened, what has been implemented in the health sector and what lessons can we learn from there to adopt into education, implementation of DHIS to for education. So as we look at the move from the MDG goals, which were all about having children access school, we are now focused on what is the quality, what is the learning outcome in the SDG goals. So I'll just give a brief country highlights, snapshots of the learnings that we've had and also the different implementations that are ongoing in the different countries that Sophia had highlighted. And this basically brings out the different contexts in these countries and trying to really understand the context of the country and see how best you can support them to address their needs. Yeah, so one of the key things that we are talking about, Sidi ended with the need for decentralizing data. Previously, of course, MS has been centralized at national level, but even when it's centralized, there's been limited use. So we've really focused on decentralizing data use. And of course, this is the beauty of DHIS too, that it can be accessed at all levels, both central and subnational levels. So for example, in Uganda, where we are piloting the use of DHIS to as an emis, we've seen that in the districts where we've implemented with the district education managers and all the planners within the districts really have been empowered to use the data. Previously, they were just conduits of this data from schools and they would just endorse the data it goes to the center. But now with the DHIS too, they can access their data and they're using that data really to inform their routine plans, allocation of resources such as redistribution of teachers and also advocacy for additional funds from the partners. And then the other thing, of course, has been that emis traditionally has been capturing more or less aggregate data and which has been mostly administrative data. But then we have other data that is within that is from other systems such as the examination data, population statistics to enable us to calculate some of the indicators that Sidi talked about such as gross enrollment, net enrollment. And then of course, with the DHIS too, we are able to integrate to have this data integrated into the DHIS too. So we have, we have examination data and we are able to calculate the pass index, the performance of these learners based on the data that we have imported into the system. And then the other thing, of course, the capability of DHIS too is being able to share data or exchange data with other existing systems. And in Uganda, we have the EIDSR that is really working in the health sector, doing monitoring surveillance in the health sector. So during COVID we are able to have a surveillance module within our DHIS for emis instance and exchange data. And this has really improved the collaboration between health and education. Also Sidi talked about the need for routine data. And of course, we saw that previously there have been annual school census that are done and most of the time they have really been delayed and this data hasn't been used. But we are testing the use of a timely integrated timely data collection tool. And so data is collected on a timely basis. And so you have more frequent data that the planners at the district level and even at the ministry level can use especially to allocate things like computation grants that really have to be allocated on a timely basis. Then really in the network within the global level, we are trying to see what can we learn and how can we build a standard metadata package for emis. Of course, emis most of the time. What we realize is that we don't have adequate package where countries can either either use to implement or adopt when they are when they are taking on the DHS to for education. So we are trying to understand what are the indicators? How are they presented? And so come up with a standard toolkit and implementation guidance for adoption. Then moving on to the individual level data and which is really a move in the SDG for goal. Really, how can we achieve lifelong learning? We are seeing that in the Gambia we have moved into individual tracking of the learners. So we are able to follow these learners along their continuum of education well from the time they start up to the time they complete and see what are the key issues with these learners, weren't they learning or which learners are dropping out or being absent from school? So all these really help us address the learning challenge that is currently being faced in most education in the education sector. Then when we talk about we also piloting the use of a learner and teacher attendance and learner and teacher attendance. This is still in the Gambia and also in Mozambique where we are able to track learners attendance of these learners. And this is really one of the key indicators of it's an early warning sign for school dropouts. So we are able to do that. And also in Eswatini still they are still both tracking individual learners and also teachers. So we need to know how many teachers are available, how many learners are available to inform really the education sector planning. So still just to add more on the cross-sector synergies, we are seeing the need for collaboration between education and also other sectors. And here we are getting very good learnings from the collaboration of synergies with health. I earlier talked about linkage of data between the education system and the health EIDSR system. But during the COVID-19 outbreak we are able to configure a dashboard in Uganda to configure the system to capture school surveillance data. Of course most of the surveillance in health has been in the community at the health facilities. But now in schools we are able to report how many learners have had symptoms related to COVID and all this data was available and we would see which schools were major hot sports and then relay also that data to the health system and have a response team go to schools to support the response to the COVID. Also we have been able to use, because schools are some of the vaccination sites, so we are able to generate to get enrollment data from the system and also inform the vaccination campaigns and this was really working in close collaboration with the health sector. Then in Uganda I think last year in September we had an Ebola outbreak. So still we are able to configure the system and see how can we add tracking of Ebola and we noted that some of the schools were really hot sports for Ebola. So the response team was really got this information and really responded to it. And also during COVID we had, we did a national data call quickly and had data imported into the system and we are able to see a country snapshot of what is our enrollment, how many teachers do we have and with that we are able to inform reopening of schools. As you know Uganda was the last, I think the country that closed schools the longest in the world I think. And then we've had various collaborations with partners and with, for example, a world food program. We are trying to see how can we pilot our implementation of school feeding, monitoring of school feeding in schools and this is in a region that is really hunger-stricken. So those are some of the key learnings and then of course we have still given the education context we are trying to see what other innovations we can build on top of DHS2. I talked about the learner and teacher attendance tracking and these are applications that have been developed on top of the DHS we are trying to pilot them and understand how can we track individual monitor individual learner and teacher attendance and then also of course have these apps beyond just tracking the learner or the teacher can we see that these apps are very user friendly they are using SMS based we are testing that in the Gambia where we have the SMS app so it's at no cost to the teacher so this is within a closed user group and the teacher can send the number of learners that are present or absent or teachers that are present or absent on a given day within a given shift so that really helps to inform still on that attendance monitoring indicator. Then also to ensure that we give feedback to schools and also to the communities we are trying to design a school report cards that are in an easy to understand format for the school and to easy to interpret and this school report cards are part it's an application still that we've developed in the DHS2 and will be used now to give feedback to the schools and more so to the communities engaging the parents the teachers some of the communities and the parents in the communities some of whom may not be at the same level of understanding to interpret these usual indicators then in Sri Lanka they are going they are of course like in Sri Lanka what they are doing they are going a separate model they've started with the capacity building of all the ministry staff the ministry of education staff so they want to own the system and move at their own pace but now they are using it they've used it to carry out a national teacher assessment to assess how many teachers are within the national system and then from there they are going to it's going to inform the next implementation so more of this will be presented I think during the DHS2 conference and academy that is going to happen in Uganda and we shall share more on that in the parallel session so lastly of course like Sophia said we are looking at integrations how can we integrate with existing systems and we are having a use case in Togo and Mozambique where we are integrating DHS2 we've started Duke and also with existing data such as mixed ego data this is survey data for really to allow cross analysis with the administrative data so these are all the learnings that we've had in the different countries and we shall be sharing more in the parallel session thank you thank you so much Monika and as mentioned we have two we have the parallel session at Hopos 10 but we also have an expert lounge at five o'clock with some of the developers that are working on email applications and the integration work so please do come have a chat I'd like to give a very very warm welcome to two colleagues from the Ministry of Education in Togo we need to thank you so much for taking the time out of a very busy schedule to come join us and be part of the wonderful DHS2 for the DHS2 annual conference so we really appreciate you being here and maybe we can give them a round of applause for coming with us thank you I'd like I'd like to call on Mr. Kozid Salih to give a presentation and I think we have Kofi who will be helping us with translation thank you very much sir okay good morning everybody I'm not Charlie Kozid, Charlie Kozid is the head of office of planning statistics and let's say assessment yes assessment department office so he's one of the head of office if we are in charge of statistics in that office and I have the pleasure to present what we are doing in Togo with DHS2 so my presentation will be on three parts Kofi wanted me to try it in English that's what I'm because we thought to meet the presentation in French so he will interpret but as I'm coming here I have the inspiration to do it in English so that you will okay we will speak about what we did that is what we were doing what we are doing now and what we intend to do so the back on what we did or we were doing that's the evolution of production education data we did it manual mechanically and then we have introduced some application such as AP info AP data and also CS pro but the two in order to have a real level and complete data produced quickly we made the choice to go to start education that is an application developed by UNESCO technician to help member countries assess data on the longitudinal plan with MS assess backgrounds so that helps us to data entry processing and use with that's our application that is available because we have the many versions of start edu2 then we after the collecting of data and we export that data from start edu2 assess to make some manipulation and we produce also dashboards into excel with the data we have collected into with the start edu2 but in 2021 we have made a diagnosis of the take off statistical information system that shows that we need to go towards anemis so as to have an integrated aspect of data use and also analysis even at the decentralized level so what's then are the objectives just to have written where we are liable data on the variety of topics in the single database or warehouse data that will help us also to improve and ensure holistic management of the education system and then to help us to make decisions in political education so as to how to improve things and then we the Ministry of Education have now sends on a collaboration frame which let's say with HISP WCA in Togo to help us so on a technical team it has been put in place composing in various stakeholders within our Ministry of Education and then they have been built up in their capacities to how to configurate the DHI2 with what we want to do and then also in the process we have collaboration with UNICEF since we are we are producing already let's say we are in the project of Datamospeak with UNICEF and also we have participated the MIS EGUL that is to use some data in the MIS to make research and to how to improve the things and all those things are made by the financing of NORADS and KISS IDLC and what we have done together and we have an integrated MIS platform in composing dual course administrative boundary and school contact details we have data on infrastructure, learners, teachers, examinations we have also the class of MIS survey that I say integrated with in the DHI2 we have a team about also already said it that we have a team that has been threatened a national team and we have also built up the capacity of some inspectors of primary and secondary school in the pilot zone that we help us that is we want everybody now to go to use the data they are collecting so as to improve the quality of this data because since if they do not use what they are collecting they cannot know the problems the various problems around it and that's it's been done with the with DHI2 and here we have strategic we have made an interoperability with that is our application that we are using strategic we are made an interoperability with DHI2 and if that's here we are let's say some screens of start Egypt 2 and that interoperability help us to have those graphs that is that is within DHI2 so the data have been taken from strategic to integrated into DHI2 that help us to produce that graphs this is the data from mixed eagles that also have been integrated into DHI2 these are these graphs make sure to make some comparisons within the data we have collected and then what the survey has been produced we have here some let's say the achievement rates of that have been calculated with our datas and then what mixed eagles has got out yes so with DHI2 we are developing some illustrative dashboards that's one of our projects we want to do with DHI2 so we have here a photo graph of the national team building capacity the national team team of six assistant actors and then there we have configured with the team of let's say DHI2 and their capacity have been built on the operator interoperability with strategic this can go on here is the pilot team zone that is this project of helping the actors local actors to use this data that's the project but the pilot zone is our let's say region my team that in search in togo to how to use the data so as to improve his quality so it is the session of training so those people has participated that is the photograph so what is the next step next step is to complete implementation of pilot phase use of data at a local level and implementation of an electronic school observation system and we want to scale up to 81 inspections and seven regions and assure the interoperability with with examination management application because we have many applications that are helped to manage many things many areas of our education and then we have also a project of school ID cards so DHI2 we help us to do it and also this will be based on the uni student identification system that is another project we have started so we expect that DHI2 we help us within our collaboration and thus I think that is all so after this okay thank you thank you no need of translation of this one very good indeed so I will just be very brief to tell a bit about how the banjul academy one year ago I mean one year three months ago actually amplified the initiative of this DHI2 for education we were able to meet after two years of pandemic actually the academy was planned and we were all having our suitcases when the whole world was locked down in March 2020 so the energy coming from this banjul academy where we spent five days together only felt more with having three days of strategic discussions with all the actors within the the global actors in the field the regional actors in the field the eight ministry of education apparent and the whole Gambia I would say all the regions even the the West African examination office you know everyone that could be taking having a stake in the DHI2 for education was there we spend we spend three days or actually the whole week with the strategic first conference then we divided into two with training for for most of them and the rest was making this communique where we actually made a plan for implementing emis data for education pan africa but not only for africa but a bit focused on africa because african union was very leading here and adea which is also part of the african union where we where we carved out in details as it looked like the implementation plan for the HS2 where we carved out in detail how we could work with countries in order to solve the gap of the lack of data in the educational field and this communique was signed by all these ministries all these partners including norad actually not often norad signing on those kind of things but felt the pressure from african union on all the others UNESCO UNICEF and all and that communique kind of amplified the the initiative throughout the whole africa and asia next we'll be seeing a lot of growing interest from countries and we can see the list here and more is coming and we can see many of them or you have taken it out which of them that was actually the minister of health that are are pushing because the the the competition between the education when when education see that the beautiful amount of data and analytical tools that the health have minister of health have the education want to have the same and the minister of health are the one training in the minister of education so we can really see the spillover of the capacity in the ministries in the government but of course also in the his groups and the region so with very limited amount of money because there is not much money in the educational sector however the the government is very very energetic and and eager and maybe have more money locally in country so there is a huge opportunity of of leveraging on this capacity that we have in the countries to show how we can actually utilize the the the tools the capacity in order to support the ministry of education in achieving the estuaries for a better education for all i will end there well well encourage the the ones that want to have more in-depth knowledge about it we have a parallel session just after the coffee break and we also have an academy in kampala in teb actually to be honest sorry for that one in august so so that's just to to run for registration and we will continue the great work and report next year the new achievements thank you okay and so that's the end of the plenary sessions for today we have parallel sessions going for the rest of the morning and afternoon now we have a coffee break out in the lobby and then we'll be starting up around 1030 in the parallel session rooms across the patio