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5. DIAGNOSIS ON COLLECTION, PROCESSING AND USE OF EDUCATIONAL
STATISTICS

81. Under the Ministry of Primary and Mass Education (MOPME), the Directorate
of Primary Education (DPE) has a mandate for collecting, processing and disseminating
primary education statistics and also progress report on EFA indicators. Under this
directorate, the Monitoring and Evaluation Unit collects the Upazila-wide summary data
on primary education through the Upazila education officer on a quarterly basis.

82. Simultaneously, under the project PEDP-1, the MIS unit of the DPE
established the regular annual school census to collect data from pre-primary to primary
levels. The data are collected through the Upazila education officers. At the district
level, the district EMIS units enter and update the data and send it to the MIS unit at the
central level by electronic media such as floppy, zip disk or thumb drive. The MIS unit of
the central level then consolidate it into the national EMIS database to produce the EFA
and other education indicators.

83. The collected data from two streams (one from Monitoring and Evaluation unit
and one from District EMIS units) are being processed by the MIS unit of DPE. Although
the EMIS databases are more comprehensive and informative, they are intended for
internal use only and have never been published for the public. The current annual
reports are produced and published from the summarised data gathered by the
Monitoring and Evaluation unit.

84. There is a gap of collecting pre-primary data for kindergarten, pre-cadet and
English medium schools. They are privately managed and situated mostly in the urban
areas. These institutions are reluctant to supply statistical information to government
departments as they are not under the jurisdiction of MOE or MOPME.

85. During the tenure of the EMIS project funded by UNDP, BANBEIS
established an EMIS database and school mapping system of the post-primary level
institution. The databases existing in BANBEIS cover secondary schools, colleges and
Madrasahs. However, due to lack of financial resources, annual census data are not
collected regularly.

86. Institutions offering professional education are managed by several ministries:
Ministry of Health, Ministry of Agriculture. BANBEIS collects data directly from the
professional institutions and processes it manually. The same procedure is adhered to
in collecting university data. The coverage of census data for technical-vocational,
professional institutions and universities is weak. In addition to its own collection,
BANBEIS compiles data from the secondary sources, such as technical education
board for technical-vocational data and UGC for universities data, to supplement its
database.

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