The scale up of DGFP eMIS continued in 2020-21

While theCOVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the country since March 2020, the Directorate General of Family Planning (DGFP) has maintained the momentum in the scale up of eMIS. The number of districts and, most importantly, the number of upazilas under the eMIS increased significantly in the last fiscal year (July 2020 to June 2021). Courses were organized for Upazila Family Planning Officers (UFPO), Sub-Assistant Community Medical Officers (SACMO), Family Welfare Visitors (FWV), Family Planning Inspectors (FPI) and Family Welfare Assistants (FWA). In total, 122 courses were organized in FY 20-21 to impart training on FWA eRegister, FPI eSupervision System, Facility eRegisters (including CSBA eRegister), and UFPO eManagement System.

A course on Troubleshooting was organized to train field supervisor and others to solve basic technical problems at the local level. In addition to core users, in all the courses, some participants responsible for monitoring the activities from the upazila or district were also included. Altogether, app specific courses were organized in 16 districts. The course on Troubleshooting was organized in Dhaka (six batches, 233 participants) for which participants were selected after conducting an aptitude test. Please see the table below for a list of courses by district, category of participant, and dates of training:

District-wise scale up

Four more new districts were added during this FY. The following table depicts the progress achieved at the end of June 2021.

The users

The number of users also increased:

Data residing in eMIS databases

The eMIS databases bear the testimony of the activities carried out by different community level workers.  From FY 2020 to FY 2021, year on year, performance data exploded substantially, as shown in the table below:

Conclusions

It can be said that the eMIS is going at full steam and databases are growing exponentially. The enthusiasm of the DGFP and its field level workers is noteworthy in this USAID-supported digital initiative. While COVID-19 pandemic created some problems and a few training programs had to be postponed later (in the last week of June 2021), the momentum created so far is likely to result in robust implementation in the coming days.