The workshop was opened by Mr. Sardar Umar Alam, UNESCO Representative to South Sudan and Head of the UNESCO Juba Office. In his opening remarks, Mr. Alam stressed the importance of up to date data for planning purposes, and encouraged the EMIS Unit of the MoGEI to do their level best to fill the education data gap for South Sudan.

The workshop was organized as a follow up to a request by the MoGEI for a targeted support to domesticate the SDG 4 indicators and related statistics, and mapping the SDG4 indicators framework with the Education Monitoring Information System (EMIS) that generate administrative data through an annual school census from pre-primary to higher education. It also was meant to develop the skills of the EMIS team in the Ministry in the management of a large data set, and reporting to SDG 4 based on the standard template sent every year by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) to all member States. Another theme of special interest for South Sudan is Out-of-School children (OOSC) as the country is struggling to elaborate the best approach in order to bring these children back to school. The UIS and UNICEF have developed a guide to conduct a study on OOSC. The UNESCO Office in Juba and UNICEF country office will lead the OOSC study process. Designing sound policies and efficient solutions in this regard requires estimates of the size of OOSC in each category and related profiles, which requires access to quality data from various sources such as school census and household surveys.

The scope of this workshop was very large as it covered many topics, as summarised below.

1. During the first two days, presentation and discussions on the metadata related to SDG 4 indicators and the related standard questionnaires designed by UIS and the dimensions of school exclusion took place. This activity was attended by 22 participants that include staff of the MoEGI, the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology (MoHEST), the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the Girls Education in South Sudan (GESS), UNDP, UN Women, UNICEF, and UNFPA. A presentation was given by UNDP on SDG reporting process at country level.
2. The rest of the workshop covered education finance statistics and administrative data production through EMIS. Based on data available, the group, composed of 10 members of MoGEI led by the Acting Director General of the Directorate of Planning and Budgeting in the Ministry, that form the core EMIS team assisted by staff of NBS and GESS was trained on the compilation of public education finance statistics, the structure of the EMIS database and data queries in MS Access. The team was also trained in using pivot tables in Excel for data manipulation, production and dissemination as an alternative tool to queries designed in Access where the team faces challenges.

At the end of the workshop, the team was able to compile education finance data that cover five years from 2012 to 2016 ready for submission to UIS. The team has also started compiling data for SDG 4 global reporting purposes and will submit 3-years data for 2013, 2015 and 2016.  No school census happened in 2014.

The team has pledged to meet regularly to practice their skills, and have requested more continuous support of this nature to build technical capacities of a critical mass of staff to insure sustainability.

The workshop was facilitated by Mr. Georges Boade, Regional Advisor for Statistics, UIS.