 Yeah, I'm chairing this session together with Jörn and Sandeep as you said, and I haven't prepared any presentation now on slides, but we do have five current and former PhD students to present today to kind of represent the breadth of research we are working on and say a bit about their experiences doing research within HISP and centered on DHS2. So we have Wilfred Zephyrino, Olav Björnar and Pamod and Björnar from Norway and Pamod from Sri Lanka are in the middle of their PhDs, early to middle and can say a bit about that. Olav also from Norway has just finished and we have some old-timers Zephyrino from Mozambique and Edem from Togo and all over West Africa can say something about how they now engage in the research. I think the main message of today is that we hope that the research we do and us as researchers can contribute to the continued strengthening of DHS2 and implementations, but we also think that implementations and those who are involved in that and in development of DHS2 should be invited more to participate also in research. I mean this is the core of the Action Research Foundation of HISP is that there should be close knit relationship between development implementation and research and for some of us that those activities you know the distinction is quite blurred but that's not natural if you work a lot with implementation necessarily. So I think we can also then after presentations discuss you know as the community around DHS2 the HISP community that includes everyone on here today and and everyone joining the the conference how can we together do good research, action research, implementation research. So I think we'll have a good presentation set of presentations first and hopefully we can revisit this theme of you know how to strengthen this collaboration and reduce the gap that may have emerged between implementation and research. So before giving the word to the current and former PhDs maybe Jörn or Sandeep would like to add something. No I've formulated everything very well Johan what we want to achieve is to engage those who are involved in implementation around in the different countries engage more in research and how to actually do that that is something we can we can continue working on between starting now. Another thing that we want to achieve is to ensure that those who have been part of the research like the PhD students etc like Zephyrino and Edomar example so how they can continue to be part of the research. So is it twofold ambitionary? Okay thank you so let's go on to the to the presentations. Yeah I'm not sure if you have thought of an order of things. I have thought about it but have forgotten to inform those but why don't we start with the youngest in terms of the PhDs and Björnar and Pamoud and then continue with Olav and Zephyrino and Edom for example. Yeah so maybe just I'll give the word to the first one on my list of those you mentioned and so Björnar do you mind going first? Sure I suppose you hear me and not please Johan. Yes we can hear you. And there is hopefully my screen as well. So hello I'm Björnar and I'm a PhD research fellow at the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo. So I've been given the honor of stealing seven minutes of your lives today to talk a bit about DHSIS II research and the subheading I was generously awarded by Professor Jörn is how to do and the importance of PhD DHHIS II research. But since I am just in the first year of my PhD journey I have wondered bit who am I to explain how to do PhD research. So therefore I will focus mostly on the first phase of the PhD journey which is where PhD Rikki like me acquires the fundamental knowledge and the building blocks needed for further research. So my take on the how to do research part will be more like how to kickstart a researcher career. So I started my PhD journey in August last year in the middle of a worldwide pandemic the world is locked down the travels are no go and even university owls are empty. But to look at the bright side I haven't experienced anything else during my PhD journey so for me this has just been the normality empty owls and all that. So I mean when you enter a reality without previous knowledge of it how do you know what you're missing out of? Like the author Hunter Thompson said you can't miss what you never had. But that was a sidetrack and my intention is not to paint a glossy picture of the pandemic. So let's move on. You've all seen this famous map the global impact of DHS II. There is no doubt there is that there is happening quite a lot of exciting stuff with DHS now. The HIST network is rapidly expanding conquering new geographical areas such as Latin America as well as charting new domains and one of these new domains is education and that is the domain where I'm going to do my research. With more than 100 countries using DHS II there is obviously quite a bit that we can learn from each other and one of the great things with these DHS II academies and annual conferences is to hear about experiences from other implementations. Another way to build and share knowledge on DHS II implementations and usage and data use and effects and the results and all that is through research. As a DHS II researcher you could contribute to increased knowledge on this fascinating computer system which in turn has the potential to benefit more than two billion people. That's a lot of people. So as you might guess this is not a small research field. I did a Google Scholar search and it reveals that to date there are more than 3,000 publications on DHS II. So with only nine years to go to fulfill the 2030 sustainable development goals there is really no time to lose. So why can you not join this awesome worldwide research community? I think you should. To do a PhD is not that hard. I mean it's a little bit of work but so there are obviously some things that need to be in place but everybody could do that. I've always always thought that it sounded cool to be a researcher. You know the ones you hear about in the news. The researchers have now discovered this awesome new discovery and so on. So when I got the chance to become one of those researchers how could I say no? However I soon realized that I couldn't just wonder out into the world, ask some questions and submit these answers to a journal. So as a PhD research fellow we are if you like it or not, but theorists, academics and that's why there is a requirement to spend half a year or something like that on courses during your PhD so that we can acquire some very useful knowledge we can use for our research. You can of course choose from several courses at university but the ones I found most interesting for my DHS II for education research is the information systems theories course, ICT for development, action research and in addition to this you also have to do an ethics course. I was not sure how it would be to go back to the school again after 10 years of absence but the truth is that I've learned so much from these courses. All the courses contribute a really good introduction to the relevant literature in the field and they kind of forces us to reflect on lots of interesting stuff going on such as ethical considerations and the theory courses also help us understand how different theories can be irrelevant for our research settings and the assignments and the exams in the courses they're also good starting points and for me they serve as the building blocks for my very first article. So in other words these courses they do give a really awesome kickstart for the PhD journey. As for the lockdown situation the professor saw it brilliantly this year last year by using digital tools such as zoom which we all know by now so in the image here you can see the professor Sandeep Sahay in a pre-recorded lecture so it was very good to see the videos queued us for finding good teaching solutions. This was a little bit of what I do know from what they've been through so far so if you're looking a bit forward I said initially who am I to talk about research and I would like to restate that as I'm looking into the future. Born and raised in Norway who am I to write research articles on findings from Africa and all over the world. So the harsh truth is that I'm nobody I cannot do research on my own none of the HISP researchers can do research on their own and that's why action research is so important. I mentioned action research as one of the courses on the previous slide and briefly but action research is a kind of research which lets researchers take an active part in the research setting contributing to changes and by that generating knowledge. So the researchers we the researchers we rely on you guys we need you and your input to do good research. So that's why during the next 12 to 18 months I will reach out to some of you to gather information for my research and hopefully if the pandemic ceases to be a pandemic I will also physically visit some of you guys to better understand how you deal with dhs2 and how you do use this in your awesome work and the results from these visits observations and conversations will then be analyzed before they're published in scientific articles as a revolutionary new knowledge. And when my three years are coming to an end all the experiences and learnings are wrapped up in the PhD thesis and I will hopefully be awarded one of those hats you can see there. Yeah and this picture is from my last field trip 10 years ago I'm really not that young anymore. So as you have might might have realized by now this kind of research is really interesting and most of all it's meaningful being part of a community that every day works for the greater good of this planet making the world a better place for all. It's a really great inspiration. So kudos to you guys for the amazing work you're doing and I hope to meet you physically physically some day in the future. And if you have some questions about the exciting PhD journey do send me an email please. And thank you for your seven minutes and over and out. Thank you Bernard. I think we'll go go straight to the next presenter Paramount. Yeah. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everyone. Let me share my presentation. Hope you can see my screen. So now that Bjorn has kind of highlighted so much about what happens in the PhD I will try to brief in the seven minutes what really inspired me who's coming from implementation background to do the PhD and what is the benefit for the his community and for people who are implementing information systems by doing a PhD. So a little bit of background about what we actually do when we're implementing. So I have been implementing information systems during the last one decade or so. So my entire team in Sri Lanka have been implementing different types of DHS to systems like it could be aggregate tracker, Android and recently some advanced integrations integrations as well as developing web applications. So we do a lot of stuff. But now when we're actually implementing even though we don't realize we do all these things we talk to people we observe we study information flows, we decide and we customize the DHS to we train people. We prepare documents and SOPs and we write reports to the donors development entities and the ministries. So we do a lot of these things. And finally we might get successful implementations as well as failures. Now one issue that I was really curious about was like what really happens? Say for example like if there is a failure. How does it matter? So the thing is like we can learn from the failures if we encounter severe issue again we can apply that knowledge. But then again if someone else who actually tries to explore this scenario first time how is that person going to get to know? So one thing is like usually people write what really happens. So in reports or internal training programs they mention this happens so please don't do this kind of I mean don't take this approach next time. So these kind of things happen. Or else maybe you have a community of practice. But a deficit I have seen is like we don't really explore why or how it happened. So that like if you can really understand why it happened we can prevent it and that knowledge can be shared. So let me explain my approach and so what I have been doing in this first year of my PhD in the last couple of months. So this what you are seeing here is from our COVID-19 surveillance system in Sri Lanka. So what is fascinating about this system is like we have been able to design entire surveillance system for COVID-19 with all these modules which is inside that system within a matter of like four to five months. So the thing is like most of us who are from implementation they might know like it's very difficult to get so many people engaged and to design a system like this in such a short span of time. So the question I had is like I mean how is that possible? So how are we able to produce this kind of ecosystem? There are like you have so many components so many others stakeholders coming in integrations are there and also to deploy it rapidly. So the thing is the questions I had was like I mean how is it organized? What really made it possible? I mean like why something else did not happen? Like usually we try to get stakeholders on board into our discussions but people like I mean they just reject they don't come on board and what are the challenges? What is the approach? Why we selected approach like this? Has similar thing happened in the past and can it be different the next time? Or is whatever happened in Sri Lanka easy generalized so that I can share it with others so others can learn and do it again? I mean in case they are going to do the same they don't have to reinvent the wheel. So this is when I mean kind of coincidentally this is at our exact time I joined my PhD program and in the PhD as we have just highlighted in his previous presentation we do a lot of things we learn like we learn how to do the literature what are the theoretical aspects around whatever we are seeing and how to do a kind of action research. So all these things we learn in the PhD and also we learn to perform action research so we are doing implementations and whatever we learn the theoretical aspect and all this searching literature and all while we are doing the doing the implementation we can apply that knowledge into our implementation and analyze it carefully. So let's see the approach that we took. So so far what we have done in Sri Lanka is like we identified few data sources on how to gather this information about around various questions I had so this is kind of like the different data sources and then once you do identify these data sources you can do some analysis and then you can find some thematic area concepts kind of like broadly highlighting like I mean what really caused all these entire scenarios and once you identify these thematic areas and concepts you try to formulate something broader right this may be a kind of abstract thing I mean this is now like so what really happens is physically I mean in a practical scenario this collecting data and kind of analyzing I found it a bit comfortable but like when you go deeper like come into inferences so this is some area that we usually struggle because especially we are coming from implementation background and we are not familiar too much about this theoretical aspect of it but and this is where the supervisors really play a major role trying to say okay now you are coming from a kind of empirical background you are implementing but look at this in a different way and you can identify some theoretical aspect and try to apply it and this is when you can produce a masterpiece which of course can be shared with others. So once you're done with this final entire big thing next important thing is you need to share so this is what I have been trying to do like I have applied I mean submitted what we what I have done so far into one or two journals and also there are so many conferences so in conferences what we usually do from case piece we try to highlight our implementation and basically try to showcase the challenges and these solutions so that's that's where we usually stop but here of course what I have tried to do in the last couple of months is not just to highlight challenges and solutions try to apply a bit of theory and try to make it a bit more concrete so that any country like I mean irrespective of where it is anybody else who's going through the work that we have done are able to apply it and so this is the most important thing to share in the knowledge so this is what has happened so far in my couple of months of PhD journey what I wanted to highlight mainly was that I mean even though we are coming from implementation background we don't realize until we really start doing research what a lot we can contribute so I will just stop there thank you so much thank you Pamud and I'll give the word to Ulam yes thank you I just had to scare off a few kids to try to get in the room I'll share my presentation so what I was thinking I could do was to essentially share an example of a DHI's two based PhD which is hopefully soon over I've submitted my PhD I haven't yet defended it so what I wanted to do was to essentially share the journey I've been through so far over this last what is it now eight years so I came from doing a master thesis on DHI's two so I was sort of already a bit brainwashed when I started and I applied to my PhD with an idea of studying how mobile technology could be used as a there's an extension of DHI's two to reach the facility community level but in practice that never really I never really started on that path because at the time Senegal requested support from the university on starting their implementation of DHI's two and because I spoke a bit of French I was a good candidate to go there and do that as a part of my fieldwork and I also got involved in other projects in the West African region so with the West African Health Organization who was working to establish a regional data warehouse and also in other countries like Gambia and Liberia and so that was sort of the starting point and working in this sort of the day-to-day work there on DHI's two supporting implementation setting up the DHI's two supporting training of users and also the core team there sort of some research topic emerged more or less from that work so I started to look at how cloud computing both had potential to support these kind of implementations but also had certain challenges and also became interested in this whole idea of information system architectures based on experience working with DHI's two in different countries and looking at how all kinds of different factors influenced how their overall health information architecture actually came to be so that's that was sort of the first phase of my PhD then a couple of years into my PhD I was asked whether I would be interested in taking leave from my PhD to go on as a convent to WHO initially for a year but I ended up staying there for two and a half years so this wasn't strictly part of my PhD per se but while in WHO I started working on these metadata packages which you've probably heard of a few times so far this week so I started working on those while in WHO and as I came back from my second month and continued with my PhD work that sort of naturally emerged as a new focus for my both practical work sort of empirical research and also a lot of my writing so based on this my research focus changed towards standardization and looking at how digital platforms such as DHI's two can support standardization which is part of the whole metadata package initiative and at this point like I said I've now submitted hopefully soon within the category of Edem and Safrina who has finished and I think just the final comment that I found during this work and that is probably obvious at least for me there hasn't been a clear plan from the beginning of what I was going to focus on what the empirical work should be and I think part of the challenge is that there are so many opportunities within the DHI's world so many cases so many topics that are of great interest and just not enough time to relevant to all of them so thank you that was what I wanted to share Thank you Ola then I think we have maybe three that have finished Wilfred Safrino and Edem will will you start Edem we have Edem here yes we need to make Edem also the co-host Safrino is already co-host so if you're ready please say Safrino okay thank you max I mean I can start I was not able to unmute myself okay yeah good morning good afternoon everybody depending on where you are and thanks to the team for giving me the opportunity to share my experience on doing a PhD within DHS2 community let me try to share my screen okay can you see my screen now yes okay good so prior to my enrollment into PhD program at the University of Oslo I can say I was working on an IT for a development firm in Mali where I was working on applying IT in various domains such as health, agriculture, education and so forth I've been doing some exciting works and at that time personally I was an open source and IT activist with action oriented and of course as a medical doctor I was seriously being watched into positivism but at the same time I was also aware that my perspective on IT was not very wide and I also knew that I wasn't skilled enough to reflect on all the exciting works that I have been doing and I was also dreaming of doing a PhD in order to to give back to a younger generation because I was also aware that we we didn't have at that time enough qualified people to lecture on various IT domains in our universities so in 2008 came the opportunity to enroll into the PhD research at the University of Oslo and one of the key interesting things for me in this program is the flexibility because I had the opportunity to combine my work with my research which is that was very important for me because I wasn't going to lose ground on what I was already doing and being part of this research community focusing on action research means for me having the opportunity to do a lot of field work and still in terms of flexibility I had and that's the case for me enrolled into this PhD program is that you have the possibility to to avoid the thrilling Norwegian winter if you want otherwise you can also be there and experience all the winter exciting activities such as living in this kind of beautiful cabin during the winter or green ski and so forth and it was also great for me to be part of a very cool international environment at the Department of Informatics there but one of the challenge for me was that as a Francophone having to work in English in a country where the language is Norway was a bit worrying but rapidly I realized that this was I mean it was a very international environment everybody was speaking English English is the working language and even in the country down everybody speak English so it was it was not difficult for me but the most difficulty was for me coming from a Francophone country to be able to to write academic papers in English in academic English that was a very key challenge for me and obviously as of all PhD research at the beginning you are very excited about being a researcher but at the later stage you ask yourself if it was a good decision to actually enroll in this PhD research because it's very demanding you have to be focused you have to to focus on your research write academic papers and then at the end work on your on your kappa but the good thing is that there are always people and mechanisms in place to support and to motivate you even if you are close to abandoning your research you will have people to motivate you to get you back on track so in my case I was doing an action research project but of course as you can see from the title I was doing more action because as I said I'm a very action oriented guy and at the time when I started there was less implementers in daily days of DHS too so there was a lot of rewarding actions to take opportunities are overwhelming as we have said so it's easily to get carried away I was involved in action in many countries Sierra Leone, Gambia, Ghana, Malawi, Benin, Ghana and so forth and obviously if you are involved in more action it means you will do less research but the good point is sooner or later the research component will claim its share on you and you have at the end of the day you have to work on your papers you have to write your kappa and you have to defend your thesis so in my case as I said I started in 2008 there was a lot of action I had to take some time off for personal reasons and I came back to continue the work and I was able to defend my thesis finally in 2016 so what are the benefits for me I think academically it was very enlightening and it broadened my perspective on IS I was not just an IT passionate but now I can see that the reality about IS is multiple professionally this PhD research gave me the opportunity to still be grounded in my professional life through the fieldwork I've been doing I was also able to build a stronger network through the various opportunities I have to meet with many great people at the University of Oslo but also outside the University in countries where I've been working and in terms of prospects during the PhD research in addition to community gave you the possibility to continue as an academic or also as a practitioner or both which for me is something very that should be appealing for many people culturally it was a lot of enriching for me because I have to I came across many cultures many people from a different culture I learned a lot and I can say that after completing my PhD I became a different person so personally yes it was a price to have a PhD and is having a PhD is not necessarily I mean it doesn't make you necessarily smarter but for sure will be less stupid morally it was also rewarding because it gave you the opportunity to make change in people's life through the actions we are doing in countries helping people to solve problems is very rewarding generating and pass on knowledge to other people is also very interesting for me and through the PhD I also had the opportunity to create an opportunity for others and I've been also able to inspire others and today I can say that I mean many people have the opportunity to work in dishes to community through what I and other people in the community we have done and that is very rewarding for me and of course the teachers to the teachers to community of family I would say is always there even after the PhD so to finish my my talk what is life after the PhD in a teachers to community I can say that I'm still in this community I feel I'm a living member of this community I have the I have the opportunity to lead the east west and central african group and we are contributing to various his research projects we are still part of the logitinal his research and we are also supporting teachers to project globally and also in countries so thank you for your attention I see book who Adam so maybe then we move on to will friend okay thank you let me try to show my screen you can stop sharing your screen Adam sorry okay everyone can see my screen yes we see it okay okay so hi everyone wherever you are around the globe my name is Dr. Wilfred Cignoni here to present a little bit of how beaches to research and how we how I have approached the beaches to journey throughout my so first of all I completed my PhD in January 2021 so I'm a little bit fresh I started my PhD in January 2016 so it took me around five years to complete this PhD journey yeah it was an up and down journey but it was also fun engaging and enlightening I think the past five years I've I've explored and I've also journeyed through different paths different countries with this particular opportunity and it also kind of enlightened me in different ways yeah so basically this PhD was under the department of informatics University of Oslo and my title was institutional work in strengthening health information systems in fragmenting settings an action research study of information dashboards in East Africa community and Indonesia now I get a lot of questions what happened between East Africa community and the nation what was the link so I thought of you know and tried to kind of start a little bit of giving you a context of the research how it started so before I joined my PhD I've been you know information systems mentor DHS to I implemented for a number of years and I've been working with the University of Oslo in implementing different kind of projects now one of the projects which we were implementing was an East Africa community building a regional system and you know through that particular project it motivated me to engage you know dive in a little bit more on research conduct the research on that you know seeing how how this particular regional system can be adopted what are the challenges in adopting the regional system in terms of you know implementing standards across different countries which you know they have different standards they have different implementation approaches and etc so it was quite a quite an interesting project which we started in 2013 and during that implementation it got me interested in doing research specifically PhD and then in 2016 I enrolled in the University of Oslo to start my research and this was East Africa community become my first use case in terms of you know understanding the standardization problem which are there and how do you mitigate this kind of standardizational kind of implemented standards so East Africa community is composed with a couple of countries Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania in the beginning and later on South Sudan also joined and there are a lot of work which we did for East Africa community now as one of my colleague some of my colleague also said doing research in the University of Oslo at least in the HS2 space provides or gives you a number of opportunities and through my PhD also I was faced with a number of opportunities for example I was exposing you know doing similar work in Somalia where the Somalia country had three states and in each state they have different standards so it was also how do you accommodate you know implementing a national information system in that particular setting where you have different kind of standards between different states and another opportunity however there's a one opportunity which came out which got me interested enough to actually include it also in my research and this was the Indonesia use case where we were tasked to you know build a district dashboard in a country where there's a lot of proliferation of you know fragmentary information systems it was a project which talks about you know building a district dashboard and something which I was very kind of interested to work with Dashboard and one as I said my title one of my key object was you know to look about how Dashboard can promote such kind of a standardization so through that you know this is more or less the structure which we saw in Indonesia it was part of fragmented you know in terms of you know programs reporting directly to the high level within without you know talking to each other and the idea was you know to come up with this particular district dashboard so through that I was exposed or again access to Indonesia country worked there for quite a long time with the Ministry of Health there and a lot of people are in Indonesia and it exposes me to a lot of kind of experiences some of the work which we did you know was you know for example going to the field to the health facility to the community talking to people even though there are different languages barriers but you know it was quite interesting to do research in that particular context you know talking with the ministry people talking with you know for example the municipality bosses you know in East Africa we were talking at some point you know we were exposed I was exposed to the you know a conference of the presidents where they were passing by looking about what was going on in terms of health in terms of different things so through these five years I was you know engaging multiple activities you know multiple research activities but also some kind of implementation activities which kind of you know helped me to accumulate a lot of information a lot of knowledge on how do you know communicate how do you kind of work together with different stakeholders and how do you do research in different contexts which you are not really familiar with because for example uh East Africa community was more or less an area which I was used to but you know going to Asia and the measure that was you know different context so how do you adjust and readjust yourself in terms of conducting these particular uh research now what have I learned a key thing is you know doing research in BHS too and specifically in the HIST network this is this is kind of an action oriented multiple disciplinary research you know we we do a lot of you know iterative processes which you know we come up with these ideas we talk with the client we engage with them we try to see what works what doesn't work and you know we learn from that and based on that learning in particular we you know we engage more and more and I think that showed me that you know while we are doing research which is research is you know individual growth but you're also making an impact within the area which you are doing and that is something which I've seen in terms of what we have strengthened and then your health information systems in different areas which have worked with in terms of collaborating with the Ministry of Health you know local stakeholders and I think another thing which we kind of you know have a long-term impact with you know the sustainability implementation which we have been doing for example you know you start with the pilot but this pilot you know grow they become a national policy you know and difference they call this jumping and push that forward and I think that that kind of signature that kind of impact is actually you know good and also I think as a researcher you do your research but you also see some kind of a long-term sustainable impact which you have done within a particular community then of course the aspect of engaging local stakeholders to the global stakeholders I think is quite important I highlight about the East Africa regional initiative which I've been doing there's been other regional initiative which I've been doing and of course the other thing which I see as a long-term impact is you know the growth individual growth as a researcher and you know individual growth also as a practitioner which I've seen now to look at the other side this is I think it's my last slide is you know I see there's a lot of synergy in terms of how this doing research in you know DHS to space his state helped to generate knowledge that could be individual could be a local could be a community knowledge and I think the important part is also how while you're generating that knowledge you're also promoting the local practices which you see there it's not like you know you parachute in a place and you come up with your own kind of you know ideas but you work together with the local team there where you kind of come up you promote you come up and promote these local practices and of course the the network also helps in disseminating best practices from one location to another and I think best out of all I think is the part of networking in a sense that you know you you you kind of strengthen your your collaboration is strengthening the people who you engage with and I think through this particular networking I think this research which we do in PhD I mean sorry in DHS to have a long-term impact locally and also globally I've tried to talk about you know the experience in this particular way my colleagues have also talked about it in terms of you know different ways but I think in the end the PhD is a it's a tough journey and and I think you need to always be tough as you go one thing is the environment within the University of Oswald is quite a good environment which promotes encourage you know self I would say self self growth and and and also kind of you know identify yourself within that particular community. Thank you real Fred then we'll just move straight to the next and last presenter Zeferino please. Good afternoon everyone yes so that we are going to share here the special thing focusing on of course we share all the story that we are shared by our colleagues we are coming from the same school we decided to focus our presentation on somehow the involvement in action research looking at the experience and lessons that from the work that you have been doing in the here since 1999 and then for that I I decided to invite one of the veterans to start to start so Emilio is going to start and then I will take the second part. Good afternoon everybody thank you very much for this presentation I'm trying to inspire here Zeferino just to explain to us what kind of energy is is bringing to the network so in Mozambique we've been involved with the partnership with the University of Oswald since 1999 in research activity on the area of health information systems so several capacity building activity has been performed lots of work has been done and also we have developed some of the exchange program and also implemented this exchange program with collaboration with collaborating with the University of Oswald but also through this collaboration it was possible to develop what we call here a critical mass of research on IS and on health information system and created also developers implemented in use users of DHS2 the DHS2 as you know is the national digital health platform in Mozambique but because of this knowledge that was created here we manage also to network with some of the countries in Africa that speak Portuguese such as Angola, Cabaret, Saint-Mé and Guinness. So the collaboration among us with Angola and the Cabaret also was possible because of the collaboration between the University of Oswald, South Egypt and partners here when I mean partners we refer to WHOs UNDP and other very important partner in this country that provided pool of resource and expertise to be used in the string in the string the HIS. Also this this kind of support was possible to create and develop the capacity of the local teams within the Ministry of Health of this country in order to create these expertise on DHS2 and also in strengthening health information system. It's very important also to mention the collaboration with these different partners in these different countries that make it very possible to develop some of the area where we are very much interested in lack of interoperability system scale up and the capacity building in Cabaret. Also the network is funded to Guinness, South and Saint-Mé where the establishment of cooperation platform which include the University of Oswald, South Egypt and the Ministry of Health in also to strengthen the countries health information system in these two countries. It's very important also here to mention that the focus of this collaborative activity was to support teams with expertise on DHS and health information system strengthening. As I said there were different partners in these countries for example in Cabaret sorry in Guinness South and Saint-Mé was this different organization that you can see here like Redis, WTO, MDP. For example in Guinness South there is also a high commission that was established to deal with COVID-19. But also there are some private companies that are involved in all of this activity that were being such as mobile operated software company. All of them and with our support we managed to develop some of the capacity of the human resources in these different countries to develop some innovation and also to scale up some of the system. I think that this is a kind of a background that Zafrin would use to explain some of the activity that we are doing in this specific area of research. Thank you Amidou. I will skip the two. This is just overall intervention areas. I think we are forward to mention some of these. So going to how I think the comment now is how we manage to involve practitioners in the process in this research. So as I said we use the MOUs with the Minister of Health with the global and also the global problems as a backbone for the research activities. So through those we also by engaging practitioners with practitioners for example in day-to-day routines for example the secondment of staff to the Minister of Health being members of technical working groups within the ministry within the different programs for example. Also the willing and ability to address the problems even when most of those problems are not part of the agreement that what we are supposed to do, what we are supposed to do in the ministries for example does help to develop that trust so that today they consider us for example as a part of the system. So we also the sharing experience where we manage to expose the global HMIS problems suggesting for example and the performing field study with the practitioners that this allows for them to be involved on the research. So we did have the previous presentation we mentioned about when we did the field work here in Mozambique we did have Minister of Health staff going with us in each of these facilities that we visit to look at the problems and then we did manage based on that to enroll some to invite some of the staff from the Minister of Health for this practitioner to take part of the master programs and the research activities. I think this is something that has been also happening or being performed by the University of Oslo for each that way for example we somehow did doing our PhD or did our PhDs from the University of Oslo by being taken from our countries to participate in this process to see the problem to see how we can solve the problem and then later on going back or coming back to our countries or to our context trying to materialize those everything that we learned during the study that have been performing in our PhD. So also motivating these the practitioners to share the experience in public events like for example in this digital academy where we did for example for us we did have a track on Tuesday where we did invited Minister of Health to present to share the experience when all they are dealing with problem and then to start the conversation about the way out to address most of the issue that they are facing. The other thing is also the involvement of students in the research we know that the common interest areas are served also the basis for developing MOU with the end collaborative programs with universities we talk local universities this allows for example staff and students internship for example myself myself in the middle we are here at South Digital but at the same time we are giving lectures at the University so there is this MOU agreement between South Digital and the University of Edward Moundland that allows us to come to do some activities at South Digital and then get these experience for example expose them to the master students or undergraduate students so that they can see what are the problems and then together we can perform better or to try to find out how to address those problems just for example with by taking the students we're going to perform fieldwork with them exposing those issues for example to try together to see how this can be solved. Setting up the last point here is about the innovation hub or the hub that we set up here with the with the aim of bringing students to today the internship here which is going to somehow create this need or appetite for them to start doing the research because they will be looking at ourselves here doing this presentation sharing the experience maybe they will say okay this I would like to do to do this or do that we do have experience here locally that some of our colleagues that come here as an undergraduate student they're doing they mastered others they will be maybe doing their PhDs so that somehow we are exposing those problems and they're doing the exchange of students with partner universities so far this has been very exciting engaging whether there's an engine there but it's engaging evolving so we have learned a lot I think everyone so I will take this to expect but I've learned a lot and then we are still learning and there's a lot of to be shared that I said we are inspiring other colleagues whatever we are we go in the country is to for them to start looking they problem see how this can do the same and also how they can engage on this on the same path that we have gone through I know that we thank you very much I will send it back to Johan Johan is no longer here I'm afraid so you have to stick with me no yeah fine so thank you very much to Emilio and Sefirino about that interesting networking of Lucifer countries in in Africa that's that's interesting and how is it of course now we have heard from the top of the cake I mean the high hanging fruits the PhDs but there are also other ways to engage in research than only through PhD that's one thing we should not forget but in any case any any of in the audience that have some questions comments and some interest in this area please please come on