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UNESCO hosted a on re-imagining the futures of Education Management Information Systems (EMIS) from May 26 to 28, 2021. With around 3000 cumulated participants over Zoom and YouTube, the event featured speakers from international organizations, Ministries of Education, and private partners to stimulate a discussion about what we need from data systems and how to make future EMIS meet our rising expectations. The event’s three days were thematically organized around COVID-19 experience sharing (Day 1), looking into the future of EMIS (Day 2), and building an EMIS community of practice (Day 3).

Day 1 opened with keynote addresses from high-profile speakers including Stefania Giannini, UNESCO’s Assistant-Director General for Education and Alice Albright, CEO of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) Secretariat, who spoke of the past and present partnerships between UNESCO and GPE on EMIS initiatives. Ms. Giannini reinforced the need for resilient and robust data systems because “planning without data is like flying blind.” Dai Shen, Senior Vice-President, Weidong Cloud Education Group, underscored the value of public-private partnerships in informing and supporting future EMIS. Speakers from China, Argentina, and Uzbekistan then shared their EMIS responses during the pandemic, followed by global and regional perspectives from GPE, UNICEF MENARO, and UNESCO-UIS regarding the challenges and affordances of educational data collection during the COVID-19 crisis. The dramatic expansion of distance and hybrid learning showed that more traditional EMIS were unprepared to reach beyond the walls of the school building to support teaching, learning and monitoring during school closures. Several common needs emerged from the first day’s speakers, including real-time data, individual data, support for hybrid learning systems, process-capturing (e.g., attendance), integration and interoperability by leveraging technologies, and the inclusion of marginalized learners in data collection.

Two sessions on Day 2 explored how to expand EMIS functionality without overwhelming the system, how to build EMIS capacity, and how to leverage technology in forging future EMIS. Speakers from South Africa, Jordan, The Gambia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), UNESCO, OECD, KPMG, Weidong Cloud Education Group, and Microsoft shared insights on the capacities, institutional frameworks, and frontier technologies that will carry data systems towards new possibilities of relevant, real-time, learning-centered management. For example, the UAE’s EMIS is an “Ecosystem for Education” whose strong and sustained partnerships power a learning core that integrates internal and external systems—such as including the Ministry of Health, Human Resource, and Blockchain—through Microsoft 360. In the future, the system will include Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR), Internet of Things (IoT), and Micro Functions to provide for adaptive content, differentiation, personalized learning, and teacher use of integrated third-party tools.

Day 3 featured two breakout interactive panel sessions. The first session discussed the environmental enablers for successful EMIS, featuring speakers from South Africa, UNESCO Santiago, African Union, and GPE. The second session further examined the role of frontier technology in future EMIS, with speakers from DHIS2 (University of Oslo), Microsoft, OpenEMIS (Community Systems Foundation), and UNESCO. During both sessions, participants were encouraged to actively contribute their ideas through interactive Jamboard discussions. Across the three days of discussions, several words stood out as central to the vision for future EMIS: integrated, resilient, innovative, interoperable, connected, actionable, community-engaged, and learning-centered. The pandemic was a wakeup call to the need for a community of practice to propel EMIS into a future of data-driven, effective decision making in education policy.

As a follow-up to the seminar, UNESCO invites all stakeholders (e.g., education policy-makers, government officials, development partners, principals, teachers, parents, academia and private sector partners) to share the challenges you face in managing education that you want to solve with an enhanced data system. The collected challenges will also be considered for a data challenge UNESCO is planning later this year, a competition where teams will try to develop innovative solutions to identified challenges. Please share your views on up to three challenges and “wishes” on how future EMIS could help you by responding to  by Friday, 25 June 2021. The survey is also available in and .