EMIS is a new learner-tracking system across all levels. Officials are confident EMIS will be useful in addressing some pending learning and policy implementation challenges in the sector, including tracking enrollment numbers.
After signing off the EMIS implementation regulations on December 16, Ketty Lamaro, the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Education and Sports said the system will be valuable in the ministry’s planning and policy formulation.
She explained: “It is a broad system that will guide our planning, budgeting, and implementation for several projects in schools and institutions.”
“For instance, it will help us get to know the number of learners and teacher transition in each school and, therefore, we can easily plan for their financing and distribution of capitation grants. We shall also use such information to track progress on government infrastructure projects being implemented in schools.”
She said once schools reopen in January, the ministry will start capturing all the personal information of learners. Based on the available exact numbers of learners and teachers, Lamaro said the government will be able to solve problems such as dropout rates and teacher absence.
The EMIS learner tracker plan was presented during the Education Sector Review workshop last week. Vincent Ssozi, the assistant commissioner of Statistics, Monitoring and Evaluation at the ministry of Education and Sports, who presented the EMIS plan, said the learner tracking system aims at integrating information about learners and making it available to respective stakeholders at various decision-making levels.
“It will also give us confidence in the information we are entering into the data system,” Ssozi said on December 14, at the two-day education review workshop at Kololo ceremonial grounds.
The workshop evaluated the performance of the Education and Sports sector from July 1, 2020, to June 30, 2021, and then set priorities for the coming financial year 2022/23. To deal with ghost teachers, Ssozi said the ministry will demand an addition into the system of teachers’ National Identification Numbers (NINs).
This information will be integrated with other government systems specifically National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA) to validate whether a specific person exists. Besides ghost teachers, the national treasury also grapples with the issue of funding nonexistent learners and teachers.
Ssozi said the tracking system will enable parents to keep track of their children’s education status. Since the majority of learners don’t have national identification cards, they will have their Learner Identification Number linked to either their parent’s or guardian’s.
HOW IT WORKS:
According to information from earlier presentations made by the developer, SMS One Ltd, the EMIS tracker is expected to integrate all data and information about learners in the education and sports sector, make it available to various stakeholders at various levels of decision and data consumption for the effective planning, management and accountability.
According to an earlier presentation to senior government officials by David Mushabe, the SMS One managing director, the re-developed EMIS will address data collection, processing, and analysis challenges that daunted the previous software.
The new EMIS software will, for example, cover information management from pre-primary, primary and secondary schools including tertiary and non-tertiary institutions, and will be online-based and accessible to all stakeholders including District Education Officers, School Inspectors, Chief Administrative Officers, and Resident District Commissioners.
According to the developers, an intuitive web portal will help schools access and create their EMIS user accounts and update data about their learners, teaching and non-teaching staff, infrastructure and facilities including physical education and sports.
“For new schools wishing to submit applications for either EMIS number, license, or registration certificate for their institutions, they will do so in EMIS. Previously, these processes have been manual and took a lot of time to accomplish. With the new EMIS, both the application and renewal processes shall be handled online,” the manual for the system reads.
Two of the peculiar features of EMIS, according to the developers, include the introduction of a unique learner identification number (LIN) and the functionality to track how learners will transfer from one school to another.
The LIN, automatically generated by EMIS, will work as the unique identifier until all learners have been issued the National Identification Number (NIN) by NIRA.
Each LIN will be linked to the NIN of the learner’s parent or guardian. In any case, the LIN will be a mandatory requirement for UNEB registration, and a learner will use the same LIN from pre-primary to university.
To avoid double-counting of learners or learner inflation, schools will not be permitted to receive and register learners in EMIS without first submitting learner transfer requests into EMIS.
Top officials at the Education and Finance ministries are confident that the use of LIN and the learner transfer features in EMIS are expected to weed out ghost learners.
Once fully implemented, the new EMIS will be handling records of close to 15 million learners from over 48,000 education institutions across Uganda.
