Supporting education systems in Lao PDR

Tupaia was originally conceived of by supply chain specialists working in the Pacific. They identified weaknesses in health data across the region and designed an innovative solution to strengthen health systems in the Pacific. However, Tupaia is not limited only to healthcare solutions.

In Laos PDR, Beyond Essential Systems is bringing their knowledge and software to the education sector. The Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) has engaged UNICEF to support them in strengthening the data quality, management and utilization for monitoring, estimation, and planning purposes. BES provides the IT support to this process – the creation of a combined platform for the whole Ministry to use to collect, store and visualise education related data in Laos. This platform is called LESMIS, or the Laos Education and Sports Management Information System.

Amongst the various departments within MoES there have been a number of Management Information Systems in use, and this has created silos where access to data may be difficult. LESMIS aims to provide a single platform for the Ministry to use where data can be shown across all levels of the education system, and utilised for planning and monitoring progress.

LESMIS has been designed as a stand-alone platform, borrowing from the Tupaia library of functions and utilising Tupaia’s powerful microservices backend, yet created with a unique URL and user interface. The aim is to hand the platform over to the Ministry of Education in Laos at the end of the project for them to administer and maintain independently, whilst benefiting from future Tupaia debugging, security patches and updates. This has allowed us to add in design elements to the site such as the colour scheme and map and dashboard pages appearing independently of each other per the requests from the users during the design phase.

Key results to date include delivery of the stand-alone LESMIS education platform for Laos, and data from 3 existing Management Information Systems being imported into the platform to show data across primary, secondary, technical and vocational education levels as well as teacher related data.

The system is integrated with Kobo Toolbox, allowing UNICEF and MoES to work together to build data collection forms that will be implemented in Laos in 2022, feeding data directly into the LESMIS platform. LESMIS allows greater access to school, district and provincial level data across Laos to those who submit data and those who use data for planning purposes. In a first for a BES platform, LESMIS has a translate function, allowing the site to be fully operational in both English and Laotian.

As we head towards the end of 2021, we have put the final touches on the initial phase of the LESMIS project and look forward to hearing feedback from users in Laos as the Ministry of Health roll out the platform to staff.