ADEA leads a peer review team on Education Management Information System in Angola
Abidjan, 4 May 2018 – The Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) through its Working Group on Education Management and Policy Support (WGEMPS) has just successfully completed an assessment concerning theEducation Management Information System (EMIS) of the Ministry of Education of Angola. The main outcomes of this Peer Review will be a detailed EMIS report outlining what steps the Ministry of Education Angola will need to take in order to be able produce and use ‘Quality Statistics’.
A technical team composed of ADEA-WGEMPS representatives, One EMIS expert from the Ministry of Education Mozambique and a representative from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have been working together in Luanda from 16th to 23rd April 2018.
In 2010, the Ministers of Education of the Southern African Development Community endorsed the SADC EMIS Norms and Standards as well as the SADC Norms and Standards Assessment Framework. This tool was developed by EMIS experts from the SADC region to be used to assess education management information systems in order to determine whether they conform to basic minimum standards. To date, ADEA in partnership with SADC and other SADC Member States and with the support of the German development agency (the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH) GIZ in short and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has conducted assessments using a peer review system in Botswana, Swaziland, Mozambique and now Angola. These Peer Reviews take advantage of local expertise in SADC Ministries of Education by engaging their EMIS officials as peer reviewers.
The schedule of the mission included several meetings. The Secretary of State responsible for Education, Training and Technical and Professional Education, Jesus Joaquim Baptista presided over the opening meeting. He highlighted that Angola was pleased to receive the team from the Association for the Development of Education in Africa as the country has been working to resolve many of its education challenges in the last few months.
Over the course of the eight-day mission in Angola, the team worked closely with the Education and Statistics Department of the Ministry of Education to evaluate the capacity of the department to produce and use quality statistics on education and training. The mission included visiting several education stakeholders some of whom were the National Institute of Statistics and the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation. The team also visited a rural Primary School No. 319, a rural Secondary School Musseque Cabeleand the Provincial Education offices in Bengo Province to see firsthand the state of EMIS at the local level. The mission culminated in a validation meeting held on Monday 23rd April where the main findings of the Peer Review were presented to education stakeholders.
The key findings of the Peer Review have shown that while the Ministry of Education Angola seems to be producing ‘acceptable statistics’ according to the SADC-EMIS Norms and Standards Assessment Framework scale, it does face resource and process challenges. In particular, the Ministry has stressed the need for training in EMIS for its staff. In a side meeting, the Minister of Education, Maria Candida Pereira Teixeira reiterated Angola’s commitment to education and sited instances where she has personally seen the need for and benefited from the availability of education statistics for decision-making. The Association for the Development of Education in Africa is confident that preliminary recommendations made as a result of the Peer Review will be implemented. Amongst these recommendations, it is that EMIS officials of the Ministry of Education receive training to better execute their mandate. It has also been recommended that the Government of Angola and its partners increase investments in the EMIS sector.
The SADC representative Ms. Lindiwe Madonsela, a Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Programme Officer in the Policy Planning and Resource Mobilisation Department presented on the history of the SADC-EMIS Norms and Standards and their associated Assessment Framework. She also noted that the new SADC Monitoring and Evaluation data capture platform could benefit tremendously from the improved data production, which should result from the long-term benefits of conducting a Norms and Standards EMIS Peer Review.
