The role of DHIS2 for Education in response to Covid-19

District Health Information Software (DHIS2) is an open-source web-based platform that has been used to capture, validate, and analyze health data for the last two decades in middle- and low-income countries.

Since 2011, the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Uganda has used DHIS2 as a national electronic Health Management Information System (eHMIS) and since 2019, Uganda has piloted and implemented DHIS2 for DEMIS (Decentralized Education Management Information System) at district level. This has allowed the districts to capture, validate, analyze, visualize and use EMIS data from schools to support routine planning and allocation of resources, monitoring and support supervision, and inform evidence-based decision making by the district leadership and education teams.

The ongoing implementation of DHIS2 for DEMIS provided a platform for collection of national learner and special needs enrollment statistics, teacher and WASH data to enable the Ministry of Education, districts and education development partners to plan for the phased safe reopening of schools in October, 2020. This was the initial reopening before the second wave of the COVID-19 in the country. DHIS2-DEMIS was then further configured to support school-based COVID-19 surveillance reporting.