Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Education Partners with KIX EMAP and HISP to Strengthen Education Data Systems

Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Education, Higher Education and Vocational Education has launched a national project to digitize two of its most important functions: managing the country’s national school meal program and planning resource deployment. The project is the first phase of a wider collaboration between the ministry and the Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX) Europe, Middle East and North Africa, Asia and Pacific (EMAP) Hub through its Rapid Customised Country Support program, which was established to respond quickly to gaps that ministries identify in their own systems. HISP Sri Lanka and the HISP Centre at the University of Oslo (HISP UiO), which develops and maintains the core DHIS2 software, are providing technical support for system development and training.

The ministry will build a custom DHIS2 application for the national school meal program, which feeds about 1.5 million students in roughly 8,000 schools. The platform will connect donors, meal vendors, schools, education offices and payment branches, and track the process in real time from funding to meal delivery and payment. This work supports the government’s commitment to digitize the program as a member of the global School Meals Coalition.

To ensure accurate, timely and consistently entered data, the project will focus on capacity building for the staff responsible for collecting and managing information at every level of the education system. Training will reach more than 10,000 school-level data officers, along with staff at the divisional, zonal, provincial and national levels, and at least half of participants will be women. 

For more information, contact emis@dhis2.org.