During the Financial Year 2023/2024, the Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) rolled out the Teachers Effectiveness and Learner Achievement (TELA) tool, a biometric school attendance system that was intended to end, or at least significantly reduce, the rampant cases of teachers’ absenteeism.
Contrary to its initial roll-out target that reached more than 14,000 government-aided primary and secondary schools, the 2023/2024 Auditor General’s report found that the tool was significantly underutilised, with an active usage rate of only 32 percent across the schools that were inspected.
This not only captures an underperformance of a system, but also evidently points to a wide range of malfunctioning and system failures across several well-intended, ambitious and well-funded digital solutions that are not aligned in function, but also not operating to their optimal expectation.
Over the past decades, the MoES has built at least six separate information systems: the Education Management Information System (EMIS) as the backbone holding institution profiles; learner records tied to a Learner Identification Number linked to each learner’s National ID; and staff data, the Teacher Management Information System (TMIS), which handles recruitment, deployment and payroll verification; TELA, a biometric attendance tool for teacher attendance; and a separate management system for technical and vocational institutions (TVET MIS); IIS, a school inspection tool; and ULEARN, a self-paced e-learning platform for teachers and teacher educators.
Each of these were funded and custom built to satisfy the deliverables of a specific funding requirement rather than as a shared MoES information need and architecture.This is explicitly named in the ministry’s newly launched Digital Agenda Strategy (2025-2032) as a problem that must be fixed with a pledge to ‘streamline, review, rationalise and harmonise’ what it calls ‘fragmented ICT initiatives’.
The most visible consequences of this fragmentation is demonstrated by tracking teacher’s attendance records through TELA.Every morning, a teacher checks in; that record is expected to flow onward into TMIS where it should facilitate payroll verification or disciplinary review. This in turn should feed into the EMIS to consolidate the national staffing and teaching load data.
The practice is contrary, with no clear trail describing the linkages and interdependence of the three systems – even where TELA is implemented, flagging a teacher absence is largely dependent on manual follow-up and verification instead of a system-triggered relay.This has clogged the information loops in the sector, dragging key decisions, interventions and compliance reviews that has stagnated rather than enhance efficiency.
A parallel draw from a smaller pilot demonstrates what functioning data systems can deliver in a school system, and by extension the education sector.
Under the GPE-backed KIX-SEEDS initiative, researchers and district officials have adapted DHIS2, a platform originally built for health-sector data, for use in schools across Gulu, Entebbe and Ntungamo.More than 200 teachers and education officials have been trained to use the system.
Despite its dismal scope, the head teachers involved describe it as providing a shift from decisions made largely by guesswork to evidence based, given the preciseness of the numbers from recruitment, to teacher performance, school feeding programmes, learner activities and additional support required for learners with special needs.
Despite the audacious position of the MoES to consolidate fragmented data and systems to facilitate planning, resource allocation and investment planning, the real test of commitment should be seen in the courage to quench the appetite for multiple and uncoordinated information systems to address the structural and institutional challenges within the Education sector by government and the key stakeholders