School Priorities - SNV

Information Management
“I now know
the importance
of handling
and managing
information
and using it
for planning
purposes.”
—Headteacher,
Nyachara Primary
School
You can’t know where you are going if you don’t know where you
are. That’s the philosophy behind using school performance reviews
(SPRs) to create better school development plans (SDPs).
There have been enormous changes to Ugandan primary education in
the past decade. All schools are now obligated to create school SDPs,
with school management committees (SMCs) ultimately responsible
for preparing, reviewing and updating them regularly. Unfortunately,
many SMCs do not know how to make a good SDP.
To remedy this, SNV initiated SPRs in several districts to collect,
manage, monitor and evaluate school information and increase
community and parent participation. This article shares the
experiences of two of those districts, Nebbi and Kabarole.
Nebbi
Universal Primary Education (UPE) dramatically increased school
enrolment. While it is, of course, desirable to have all children attend
school, higher attendance has exacerbated school management
problems, creating more information to manage without providing
the hardware and technical knowledge to collect and process it. In
districts like Nebbi, it is therefore harder for educators to get accurate
and relevant data—on everything from attendance to gender balance
to test scores—to help them undertake school development planning,
let alone monitor its implementation.
While is tempting to simply throw technology at a problem like
52