[July 18, 2011] 20 Districts Get Software for Tracking Absenteeism Tweet Jul 18, 2011 (The Monitor/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) -- A software for tracking absenteeism in schools has been installed in 20 districts across the country. The District Education Management Information System (Demis) will link critical school data such as teacher and student absenteeism directly from schools into the National Education Management Information System. Mr James Curry, the president of Agile Learning Company, a firm contracted to develop the software, said: "Our team will regularly visit those areas to check the effectiveness of the system." The software, which will be installed in other districts, provides relevant and functional information for planning, management and evaluation of the education sector at the school, district and national levels. Mr Curry said starting this week, individual schools will be connected to the system and those with Internet connection will be given the first priority. He was speaking during a training on the use of the new technology for top education ministry officials in Kampala. Data collection In May, chief administrative officers education officers planners and inspectors of schools from the selected districts 20 also received similar training. Education Ministry Under Secretary, Mr Aggrey Kibenge, said the new technology will simplify data collection which was manually done. The new technology comes as a relief to the ministry, which has always been blamed for doing nothing about teacher and pupil absenteeism in the government free education programme. A 2009 report by a Dutch agency, SNV, ranked teacher absenteeism in Uganda the highest in the world at 35 per cent, with teachers guaranteed to miss at least two days of work each week. Mr Kibenge said the ministry has always used the annual school census to generate data which he said is marred by a number of challenges. "We recently opted to use attendance rather than enrolment data in the allocation of resources. However, generating this data has remained problematic and costly," he added. The project is funded by USAID to a tune of $2.9 million (about Shs6.8 billion). [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]