About the Education Management Information System

What EMIS is

The Education Management Information System is the central data platform for basic and senior secondary education in Sierra Leone. It collects, validates, analyses, and publishes information about every public, private, religious-mission, and community school recognised by the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education (MBSSE).

Unlike legacy systems that relied on annual paper census forms, EMIS reads data directly from the live school management network operated at gov.school.edu.sl. Every admission, transfer, attendance mark, and exam result reaches EMIS within minutes of being recorded by a head teacher.

What EMIS holds

• A national registry of all active schools, including code, ownership, district, and infrastructure attributes.
• A live student register keyed by the National Student Identifier (NSI) — a permanent, lifetime number issued at the point of nursery or first-class admission.
• A live teacher and staff register linked to qualifications and school deployment.
• Annual School Census submissions, validated against the live operational data.
• Out-of-school-children tracking, school safety reports, and infrastructure deficits.

Who uses EMIS

The platform serves five communities directly:

• Ministry policy makers — for evidence-based planning, budgeting, and SDG reporting.
• District education officers — for school inspection, attendance enforcement, and resource allocation.
• Head teachers — as the operational system that runs their school day-to-day.
• Parents and guardians — through the parent portal at gov.school.edu.sl and the Peeap fee-payment integration.
• Citizens, researchers, journalists, and international partners — via this open-data portal you are looking at.

Open data

EMIS is committed to publishing as much aggregate data as can be released safely. The Downloads catalogue contains a national Fact Sheet PDF and machine-readable CSV exports of schools and enrolment by district. More datasets — teacher deployment, exam results, infrastructure indicators — will be added in subsequent releases.

Personally identifying information is never released. Aggregate counts are derived live; the only individual-level surface is the NSI verification page, and that returns only the student's initials, school, class, and enrolment status.

How EMIS was built

EMIS sits on top of the school management system used by all 34 schools currently enrolled with MBSSE. The data layer is shared: there is one student record, one teacher record, one school record — visible to head teachers in their day-to-day workflow, and visible here as aggregate national statistics with no separate data-entry burden. This is what UNESCO calls a real-time EMIS: census-grade data without the census-cycle wait.