Abstract
Measuring the quality of education in a timely and reliable manner is at the core of social development of any country. To solve this pressing issue, the Ministry of General Education in Zambia has initiated a pilot project to strengthen their Education Management Information System (EMIS) by implementing a digital report structure to complement their annual, paper-based system. As is well documented in the literature of Information Systems and Health Management Information Systems, contextual conditions in low resource countries often challenge best practice approaches for implementing functioning, large-scale management information systems. Using the case from Zambia, this study shows how centralized approaches to EMIS-implementation can be used to simultaneously assess multiple implementation models, but also how this might increase the gap between local and national data needs. This thesis is an exploratory, interpretive case study of Zambia’s first year of implementing a mobile to web EMIS, designed to overcome the many infrastructural challenges present in Zambia. The case study emphasizes school and teacher level data needs and objectives through a bottom-up participatory approach to understand the enabling and constraining conditions of an EMIS-implementation, and how to best design it for timely and decentralized decision making. The study concludes that an EMIS that supports timely, decentralized decision-making needs to support multiple user objectives and needs, and be flexible enough to fit various work processes and tasks, while the technology needs to overcome infrastructural challenges and fit with staff skills.