The Mountain Kingdom of Lesotho is using OpenEMIS to transform the education sector through better data.

Although Lesotho is one of the smaller countries of Southern Africa with a population of 2.2 million, the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) is tasked with managing a national education system with more than 350,000 students in over 1800 institutions. The Ministry of Lesotho aims to improve its education sector through the implementation of policy frameworks such as The Sustainable Development Goals, Africa 2063, SADC Protocol on Education and Lesotho National Strategic Development Plan and the Education Sector Plan 2016-2026.

The Education Sector Plan 2016-2026 provides the current policies, programs and strategies for national education reform. This plan highlights the ability to expand learners’ enrollment and retention at all education level, with the hope of promoting a literate society with access to continuous learning opportunities. The MoET is embarking on a new initiative to implement OpenEMIS as one of these strategies in achieving the objectives of the 2016-2026 plan.

The decision to use OpenEMIS is based on the overall desired change that the system intends to bring about which is to drive the process toward better education outcomes through the availability of better data in Lesotho: more timely, accurate and sub-national data for decision-making. The Ministry is not yet able to track data by individual learner or teacher at school, regional, and national level. Aggregate data on institutions, students and staff is mainly collected from schools in paper-based form through surveys. Despite efforts to collect this information, data sharing between institutions and other government agencies is lacking. The current system also lacks analyzing and reporting tools which is key to making evidence based decisions. There are also several other initiatives which require data collection at the institutional level. However, the data is collected and directly reported back to the entities requiring the information and is not shared with the schools.

With assistance from UNICEF, the MoET will be guided by Community Systems Foundation in the development and implementation of OpenEMIS which will provide electronic access to real-time data to inform the Ministry in regards to their priority areas, including but not limited to, the state of literacy, examinations, repetition and dropout rates as well as assessments, as outlined in the Education Sector Plan. Through the use of OpenEMIS, the MoET will be able to address gaps in the education, provide better monitoring and transparency, and provide a robust decision support system for the country. This will help to ensure that existing education data is put to good use and that the use of the OpenEMIS technology strengthens national capacities.