With UNESCO, Yemen is on its way to collect data on education

UNESCO is deploying extensive efforts to put in place a fully functional Education Management and Information System (EMIS) in Yemen, which education sector has been heavily impacted by the ongoing conflict. Today, the UNESCO Multisectoral Regional Office in Beirut is on track to put the complex system elaborated at use, to finally achieve concrete objectives. As Marco Pasqualini, Education Specialist at UNESCO Beirut, puts it, “the aim is to build on all what has been accomplished in the past years”. The next goal? To establish an education census for the whole of Yemen in 2024-2025, the very first since the beginning of the conflict. 

“The question is: how do we get there?" asks Pasqualini. "What are the next steps to produce an education census for the country? And how to manage the EMIS on the long-term? At the present time, we need to strategically think on the best way to use EMIS, and this involves people, regulations, software, hardware and a calendar.”

To elaborate the much-needed strategy, a team of the Yemeni Ministry of Education held intensive meetings over the month of June in Beirut, guided by experts from UNESCO. They are conscious that their involvement and the census they are preparing will help understand the situation of education in their country, so that policymakers can make informed decisions and elaborate targeted responses, policies and programmes to improve the status of education in Yemen. “The workshop is helping us getting trained on the best way to elaborate a strategy and a vision for the upcoming census, which is a necessary step if we’d like to start from somewhere”, says Saeed Al-Hurbagi, Deputy Head of the Technical Office at the Ministry of Education.

“Discussions were fruitful, assures from her side Nisrine Naguib, as we did a clear assessment of the current situation. The workshop is also an opportunity to delve into details and draw a roadmap together, with a clear timeline according to the country’s needs. The challenges are unfortunately compelling, mainly when it comes to time constraints and financing, but we hope to be able to constantly develop the EMIS, so that it becomes a sustainable system”.

The EMIS project is funded by the Global Partnership for Education, as part of the UNICEF and World Bank “Restoring Education and Learning” project. It concretizes a strong partnership between the Ministry of Education of Yemen and UNESCO, building on the country context and looking towards the future. “We have a national vision that we’d like to achieve by 2030, affirms Ethan Seif, a UNESCO national expert. For that, we need tools and data which are indispensable, and this is where UNESCO’s support comes as crucial.”

In the upcoming months, a series of workshops will tackle more essential topics, such as national policies, revising the questionnaire for data collection and making a pilot exercise, which is the first concrete step on the ground to perform a country-wide data collection exercise.