BY MICHAEL TUMWESGIGYE
Education is an important part of the global development agenda. SDG 4 requires countries to promote “inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning for all.” As a result, access to, quality of and equity in education are critical indicators.
Solid education data is therefore required for evidence-based decision-making; this data can be obtained from education management
information systems (EMIS) that are managed by ministries of education of different countries. Data is critical to achieving the goals outlined in SDG 4. Educational data not only allows countries to track their progress towards SDG 4, but also allows them to identify gaps in their
education systems and determine the policies, reforms and programmes needed to bridge those gaps. Following the 11-13 April 2018 International Conference on EMIS in Paris, France, organised by UNESCO and the Global Partnership for Education (GPE); EMIS has become a critical component of the international educational agenda. Uganda’s Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) has used an Education
Management Information System (EMIS) since 2014. However, due to challenges, such as; weak legal and policy frameworks, funding and human resource, the existence of multiple parallel systems, a lack of quality standards, a poor identification of data needs across the spectrum of data producers and users, delays in data collection, processing and dissemination of findings, and a lack of quality assurance, its operations were halted in 2017.
In response to a UNESCO study (TISSA, 2014) that revealed challenges in teacher quantity and quality, as well as data collection, the government developed a Teacher Management Information System (TMIS) in 2019 with assistance from UNESCO. The online TMIS, which went live in 2019 is intended to standardise teacher records. The Ministry decided to consolidate quality data from various sources into a single hub where validated, quality information can be easily obtained as part of the EMIS upgrade, which has not been fully functional since 2017.
TMIS therefore serves as the primary source of teachers’ data. TMIS will better position the government to make evidence-based policy decisions based on reliable, timely data generated internally. If EMIS and TMIS are used properly, we will no longer hear about ghost teachers, ghost schools, or ghost students. Uganda will gain a better understanding of the total number of qualified teachers
in the country and how they are distributed. They will also be able to sex-disaggregate data, which will shed light on equity issues.
The data collected will then be used by ministry personnel to make more informed decisions about educational plans and resource allocations. TMIS, as a system, has presented principals and teachers with challenges such as; a lack of infrastructure, usability and structural issues. TMIS is a worthwhile initiative but it has underperformed since its launch in 2019. This is why the government has been unable to remove quack teachers from both private and public schools, let alone free its payroll of ghost teachers.
Previous physical interventions, such as; school inspections, teacher validation, and head counts, some of which involved intelligence agencies have proven ineffective in aligning and cleaning up the teacher’s payroll.
According to the guidelines, teachers must provide their bio-data and upload their academic documents to the designated website. Teachers, on the other hand are baffled by the seemingly straightforward four-step activity. According to an internal source at the Ministry of Education that requested anonymity, TMIS is a good initiative but it is underutilised because a significant number of teachers have not yet registered in the system. On the other hand, Fortunate, a teacher in Western Uganda, stated that TMIS “…is not a user-friendly system…TMIS system is complicated and with a lot of error messages; it kept taking me over and over to already completed steps and sometimes it would shut down.” I asked a colleague who had registered, but neither of us succeeded in registering my information.” Likewise, according to Joseph, a primary school teacher in Mitooma district, the distance to find a place to use for registration is the other challenge to worry about. “After walking 10 kilometres to access an internet cafe to scan my academic documents, the manager of the internet cafe tried to register for me about three times and failed, later, the electricity went out and I had to wait for a whole day, but even when electricity was restored, the system was down.” Sarah, a teacher in the Mitooma district, attributed her failure to register on TMIS to a lack of computer knowledge as well as being off the grid. She was unable to register or scan her documents.
The five-step registration process which includes; document verification, linking submitted data to the National Identification Registration Authority (NIRA) and the payroll, would be a good intervention to iron out challenges of education malpractices, but it may be hampered from being effective due to an internal cartel of people benefiting from the mess that may jeopardise the initiative. The system requires all teachers to upload certified academic documents. However, with our university administration’s bureaucracies, this takes a lot of patience
and money. According to a TMIS official, some teachers uploaded marriage certificates instead of academic documents. This could indicate a lack of training on the registration process and how the system works, or that they do it on purpose. It is noted that some teachers have already uploaded fake academic documents into the system and it is good that the system has already detected them.
TMIS is a good initiative but it must be reliable and user-friendly. Moreover, the government must ensure that teachers in hard-to-reach areas are assisted to register on the system after being trained on its functions. There should be strict measures in place to ensure system integrity and that all data entered is clean. If properly applied, education quality and equity issues will be addressed.
