A Capacity-Driven Approach to OpenEMIS in Jordan: A Spotlight on Local Technical Support, Mania Dablan
The Ministry of Education (MoE), Jordan began implementing OpenEMIS five years ago to enhance education planning and strengthen the national capacity to collect, manage and use timely quality sub-national data for evidence-based decision-making. Since that time, with the consistent support of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and financing through several development partners, Community Systems Foundation (CSF) has been there to provide support to the government, to ensure the system is robust and that the government can sustainably own and operate OpenEMIS.
More recently, this work has been guided by the 2020-2022 EMIS Operational Plan, which seeks to improve soundness and data utilization for informed decision-making through OpenEMIS.
To ensure direct and sustained capacity building and technical assistance to key stakeholders, Mania Dablan joined a diverse and multi-faceted CSF project team. Based in Amman, Jordan, Mania has been instrumental in working to support the achievement of the MOE Operational Plan by backstopping the team at Queen Rania Center (QRC) to ensure skills and competencies related to OpenEMIS are in place.
Mania started her career as a teacher in Syria, where she saw first-hand the importance of accurate and timely data in schools to address the education needs of their students. Understanding these gaps, she worked as a project manager for eLEARMENT, a platform that provides interactive courses and training programs to improve skills and boost productivity by combining technology with creative instructional design. This gave her the opportunity to combine technology with education and manage projects for UNICEF and the MoE's across the Middle East. With a better grasp of the teachers' needs and the role of technology in solving the problem, Mania joined CSF to provide technical assistance to Jordan's MoE and to support the growing interest in implementing OpenEMIS throughout North Africa and the Middle East Region.
In her role, Mania supports capacity development activities, provides on-the-job training and assists her project counterparts in the ongoing testing of OpenEMIS software. Mania has also translated numerous OpenEMIS publications from English to Arabic for users at the national, regional, and school levels.
Having experience working in the Jordanian education sector, Mania understands first-hand the importance of OpenEMIS to support education authorities at all levels, including teachers, who are one of the most important resources for data entry in the country. Mania looks forward to seeing the continued development of OpenEMIS because her interactions with the government and the QRC have shown her that OpenEMIS is a success story for the education sector in the country.
Similarly, the MoE recognizes that OpenEMIS plays a vital role in understanding the status of education in the country. With Mania’s support to the initiative, the Ministry of Education and the Queen Rania Center are learning to better understand how to manage and use data more effectively within OpenEMIS, as well as to develop annual strategic plans to guide educational decisions and support evidence-based policymaking.
Mania is excited to continue supporting the government of Jordan and looks forward to extending her support to the implementation of OpenEMIS across the region.
CSF’s continuous support of the OpenEMIS initiative in Jordan is informed by an evaluation conducted by UNESCO in 2017 that outlined recommendations on how the government can own and administer OpenEMIS sustainability.
As CSF continues to work in support of the Sustainable Development Goal 4 across the world, our team is pleased to deliver solutions that improve accountability, collaboration, and transparency and harness the power of data to benefit communities economically, socially, and environmentally.