School Priorities - SNV

Information Management
What types of phones can we use?
Twaweza, an East African non-profit organisation that supports transparent governance,
purchased Java-enabled mobile phones for the pilot and the CCIS managed the project’s
software and hardware.
These phones, which cost approximately $50, have several advantages over regular mobile
phones. First, they can easily be identified as belonging to a school, lessening the chance
that they will disappear. Second, they use forms, which make it easier to enter data. Most
importantly, they use inexpensive GPRS technology, with each message costing 1 UGX,
compared to 260 UGX for an SMS. Bringing CU@SCHOOL to scale would further
reduce the cost per school. While providing mobile phones to headteachers throughout
Uganda would cost approximately $400,000, the software has already been developed
and tested. Collecting the data using GPRS (based on 5 sent messages per school per
week for each primary school in Uganda) would only cost US$ 300 a year, making the
project easily sustainable.
3. The data is synchronised onto
computers at district local government
(DLG) offices and integrated with the
national EMIS database.
All of this happens instantly. The system
can function without a paper trail and there
is no need to re-enter the data. But the
best part is that—because the information
is viewable on multiple computers
simultaneously and does not rely on the
DLG to distribute it—the system has the
potential to make school attendance figures
truly transparent, as everyone receives the
information they need to look together for
solutions to the attendance problem.
It increases transparency in four ways:
First, district education officer (DEOs) and
district inspectors of schools (DISs) have
instant data, so they can easily identify
which schools have attendance problems
and follow up.
Second, the database automatically
generates easy-to-understand reports
that are sent to schools, subcounties and
parishes, so officials can ensure the data
being sent by headteachers is accurate.
Third, by providing attendance reports
through newspapers, local radio and
automated SMSs along with suggestions on
how to engage with their schools to improve
their children’s education, the project
stimulates parents and communities to take
ownership of their local schools.
Fourth, the project posts the database
on the Internet in the form of interactive
maps with individual schools’ data as well
as subcounty “heat maps” that compare
attendance in different areas.
Did making attendance rates more
transparent improve attendance? And if so,
did increased attendance lead to increased
learning?
Since the pilot spanned only two terms,
any improvements to student learning
were expected to be minimal, so the main
focus was to increase teacher attendance.
SNV oversaw spot checks to validate the
information sent by headteachers; districts
continuously monitored attendance figures
for improvement throughout the pilot. A
follow-up study at the end will compare the
2009 baseline results against the current
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