Statutory Mandate

I. Legal basis

The Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education derives its mandate from the Education Act of Sierra Leone and subordinate Ministry policy instruments. The publication of national education statistics is a continuing obligation under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 (Quality Education) and Sierra Leone's Free Quality School Education policy.

II. Scope

EMIS shall be the central national repository for data relating to:

1. All public, private, religious-mission, and community basic and senior secondary schools recognised by MBSSE.
2. All learners admitted to those schools, identified by the National Student Identifier (NSI).
3. All teachers and supporting staff deployed in those schools.
4. All school-level infrastructure, including but not limited to classrooms, sanitation, water, electricity, and connectivity.
5. National examination results administered by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) for the Sierra Leone cohort.
6. Out-of-school-children registers maintained by district education offices.

III. Authority

EMIS operates under the authority of the Directorate of Planning and Policy of MBSSE, with technical delivery overseen by the Ministry's chief data officer and operational input from district education offices in all sixteen administrative districts of Sierra Leone.

IV. Duties

1. To collect, validate, store, and analyse education data continuously and in real time.
2. To publish at least one Annual School Census Digest within ninety (90) days of the end of each academic year.
3. To make aggregate education indicators publicly available through the EMIS public portal at emis.gov.school.edu.sl.
4. To provide reliable statistics to UNESCO Institute for Statistics, the Africa Union, the World Bank, and other authorised international partners on request.
5. To safeguard the personally identifiable information of every learner and member of staff, releasing only data that has been anonymised or aggregated.
6. To support the National Student Identifier as a permanent, lifetime, and transferable identifier issued at the point of first admission and honoured by all downstream education and financial systems.

V. Right to access

Every citizen of Sierra Leone has the right of access to the aggregate statistics published by this portal. Requests for non-aggregated or research-grade datasets should be made to the Directorate of Planning and Policy and will be considered in accordance with the Ministry's open-data policy and the Right to Access Information Act.

VI. Review

This mandate shall be reviewed periodically by the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education in consultation with the Ministry of Information and Civic Education, the National Civil Registration Authority, and the Office of National Security where data-handling considerations require.