Rebooting Education Management Information Systems for the post 2015 world

Annual schools censuses (often referred to as EMISs) have been an essential tool for educational planning. Substantial resources have been devoted to their improvement but success has been mixed and planners have often... [ view full abstract ]

Annual schools censuses (often referred to as EMISs) have been an essential tool for educational planning. Substantial resources have been devoted to their improvement but success has been mixed and planners have often struggled to fully exploit EMIS data. Meanwhile MDG monitoring has relied heavily on household surveys which frequently give different estimates (see Sandefur & Glassman 2014 The Political Economy of Bad Data: Evidence from African Survey & Administrative Statistics, CDG wp 373). Finally learning assessments rely on school based surveys, often within an evaluation of a specific programme.

The new SDGs require more nuanced indicators, for many different sub-populations, produced with more leadership from national authorities as opposed to international agencies. At the same time there are new possibilities offered by the rise of “Big Data” and other initiatives based on the rapid development of mobile technology and geolocation.

Our paper will present practical examples of ways to meet these challenges drawn from our experiences with EDOREN which is a DFID project designed to embed high quality data, research and evaluation in DFID Nigeria’s education portfolio and the education policy of partner Nigerian States. We will cover

- New ways of aggregating EMIS data to facilitate its use for planning
- Insights obtainable from linking school level data from multiple censuses
- The use of new(ish) technology and methods to improve the quality of EMIS data
- Adding value to EMIS data by linking to external datasets