The Directorate of Primary Education (DPE) has launched and implemented the Fourth Primary Education Development Program (PEDP4) to provide quality education for all children in the country. The program focuses on educating children from pre-primary up to grade 5 through an efficient and effective system. The scale of this ambitious program emphasizes the importance of having a comprehensive Information Management System, which will enable DPE policymakers to make data-driven decisions on different administrative and governance aspects.
IPEMIS is the materialization of this system that aims to address the existing challenges and streamline the overall processes with an emphasis on data accuracy and visibility. The IPEMIS project kicked off on July 2020 under the guidance of the Directorate of Primary Education (DPE) and with funding from UNICEF and ADB. Later, Dynamic Solution Innovators Limited joined as the software development partner.
The massive endeavour of planning and delivering primary education throughout the country involves a wide variety of users starting from field-level offices across the country to the ministry. To realize the project, the first requirement was to map the existing processes, plan how to streamline and transform these into a digitized solution, finalise the data points, identify different levels of users, and define their exact scope of work in accordance with their professional responsibilities. The primary outline of the IPEMIS solution was drafted during the early months through an extensive requirement analysis with all stakeholders. Based on the analysis, development started on April 2021 through an inauguration ceremony. After the development and bug-fixing of the major modules, the solution was made available for all users on March 2022.
This milestone application manages the data of 1,30,000 schools, 3,50,000 teachers, and more than 2 Crore students across the country. All the government and primary schools in all 64 districts are registered with the IPEMIS system. Different operational functions of these schools such as School Management, Teacher Management, Student Management, Annual Census, and Book Distribution are being performed through the application. Secondary functions like Teacher Transfer, Teacher Training, and Training Management are also being performed through various modules of the IPEMIS application and integrations with third-party applications like Tangerine. The application has been developed according to the organizational structure of DPE with user provisions starting from the ministry level to field officers at the district, upazila/thana and union levels. Administrative areas have been introduced according to the administrative division of DPE with appropriate user roles and privileges to replicate the structure of DPE administration down to the union level.
Since all the functions including Annual Census and Book Distribution are currently being performed through the IPEMIS solution, all data are available in one integrated platform. This enables the users to generate different reports based on different criteria and obtain a holistic view of the primary education sector. The IPEMIS application is equipped with multiple dashboards with graphical representations of different reports that enable visualization of the data on a more granular level through drill-down reports, providing DPE with a powerful tool for efficient and effective decision-making. These dashboards will aid policymakers to make informed decisions regarding policies, allocation of funds, and administration of the primary education sector. The IPEMIS solution is expected to drive digital transformation in the primary education sector by leveraging the latest technologies and trends in the IT domain and in turn improving the coverage of primary education and realizing the goal of education for all children.
