The Ministry of Education (Mineduc) will soon deploy technology that will help it in gathering critical schools data meant to inform sector policymakers.The Education Management Information System (Emis-Gis) comes as relief to Mineduc as it will be getting records on all education institutions in Rwanda, without necessarily deploying its staff at the grassroots.The ministry has already trained 30 District Education Officers (DEOs), and 60 Sector Education Officers (SEOs) who will also train their colleagues to use the system.In an interview with this paper last week, Theogene Kayumba, the director of ICT at the ministry, said: "The programme will facilitate monitoring and evaluation by helping in doing school census and providing the ministry with all information about every school in the country.”The system, which officials expect to take off in April, will also help in getting information about staff, students, school’s infrastructure challenges, textbooks, health, sports, examination, girl’s education, among others.  The information gives details on dropout rate in schools across he country, the enrollment rate or the number of teachers, the number of classrooms per school, students with disabilities, among others, he added.Kayumba said the system will be using two means simultaneously.In the first case, a questionnaire will be sent to all schools in the country to be filled and returned to SEOs, who will then collect all the documents and forward them to DEOs.The latter would then make data entry before linking the information on the district server. After entering the data, the software has multiple report generation feature.The ministry’s ICT office will be in charge of importing the data from every district to Mineduc servers.The second way to get information from every school is by using Gis, especially the geographical location of schools to inform decision-makers.The system, Kayumba said, is part of the ministry’s wider plan to improve education information management while easing assessment of the education sector all through.It will also ease access to information by different stakeholders, he said.Old systemUnder the current system, the ministry could send its technicians to every district to support DEOs to collect and to enter the data in computers, which consumed a lot of resources."We used to spend at least one month entering data in excel sheet. Even then, the information was not always complete; rather, at a certain time, we could be asked some information which we didn’t have,” said Placide Tuyisenge, the Nyarugenge DEO.Petronilla Musabyimana, the Ngororero DEO, said the training they received would help them reduce the time spent on collecting data compared to the old system."Besides, we will always get accurate information,” Musabyimana said.Prof. Laurent Nkusi, a senator and an academic, said: "The programme is good since it will provide the decision makers with accurate information. Let the ministry ensure that the information is always up to date.”After training the education officers at the grassroots, the ministry plans to extend the same training to other education stakeholders.Emis is an international system used in many developed countries. In the region, Uganda and Kenya are some of the countries that use it.In Rwanda, the system will be rolled out in March countrywide.