Towards Integration and Data Sharing to Enhance Child Protection in Uganda

The 2020 Uganda National Child Policy underscores critical areas of child health and survival, education and development, protection and participation, and system strengthening. One of the key strategies under systems strengthening is to promote evidence-based planning and programming for children through a Comprehensive Child Wellbeing Information System (CWIS). The CWIS is hoped to improve access to and availability of quality data, information-sharing and national tracking of outcomes. Over the years, the Ministry of Gender Labour and Social Development (MGLSD) and partners, developed a number of Management Information Systems (MIS) to address various departmental and program needs. Other Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) with related functions also developed MIS. The many systems evolved into information silos with little focus on integration. Overtime, this led to fragmented digitization of child protection functions, data duplication, limited coordination and wastage of resources. The MGLSD has taken some steps towards harmonisation of data in the social protection domain through establishment of a National Single Registry (NSR) for Social Protection. The NSR has to-date linked some child protection MIS and generates some cross-cutting data based on the various social protection indicators. But several other MIS in this thematic area have remained unlinked. This paper examines Uganda's efforts to integrate and facilitate data sharing in child protection in order to enhance service delivery, benefits realised from current efforts, challenges faced/gaps, and ways existing challenges/gaps can be addressed to advance efforts to further integrate and share data with a possibility of a single sign on. This account is hoped to benefit child protection actors in Uganda, outside Uganda and other social development sectors particularly those still operating information silos.