Project description
The project aims to develop information systems that can make data-driven decision-making accessible to schools, districts, and the national level to inform policy planning and design of education sector interventions. The research project centers on activities in The Gambia, Uganda, Togo, Eswatini, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Sri Lanka, but also draws learnings from DHIS2 for education implementations in other countries. The project addresses the following key problem areas:
- the need for a flexible community owned and community developed EMIS platform
- the need for systematic education data collection and use based on international standards
- the need to improve data utilization all levels of the education system albeit with an emhasis on the middle tier, and
- the need to scale EMIS knowledge and innovations across country borders
HISP UiO leads a consortium of implementation research partners. The project partners include HISP West and Central Africa, HISP Uganda, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, and Save the Children Uganda. Together, we investigate two research questions:
- What are effective approaches to enhance decentralized education information use based on international data standards?
- How can best practices in education data utilization be shared and scaled between countries?
The project partners engage with education data stakeholders to identify ways to visualize and disseminate school and district education data. The project experiments with the development of custom data visualization tools for district planners and managers, school inspectors, school managers, Parent and Teacher Associations, and Neighbourhood / Village Committees. These local innovations are made available to the wider DHIS2 community through the DHIS2 App Hub, DHIS2 Academies, and the DHIS2 Community of Practice.
Overall, the project follows an action research methodology, which entails a dialectic relationship between practical findings and theoretically informed analysis. Theory feeds into implementation to learn and improve, while practical experience informs further specification of theoretical insights. The EDU research project follows a long tradition of action research with HISP UiO and trains both Ph.D. candidates and Master Students.
Financing
This work has received support from Norad under grant agreement QZA-18/0062. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Norad. This work has received support from the Global Partnership for Education Knowledge and Innovation Exchange, a joint endeavor with the International Development Research Centre, Canada. The funding mechanism is administered by IDRC under grant agreement No. 109371-001. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of IDRC or its Board of Governors.