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Every year, vaccine-preventable diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus and polio affect over 30 million children under the age of five years in Africa, resulting in an estimated 500,000 deaths. Nigeria alone accounts for approximately 30% of zero-dose children worldwide, resulting in high child mortality rates. With the support of HISP Nigeria and the CDC, Nigeria started implementing DHIS2 for routine immunization programs in 2013, and later added vaccine supply chain data to facilitate triangulation of immunization coverage and logistics indicators. Together with a host of interventions, this unified DHIS2 system has contributed to significant progress toward Nigeria's immunization goals: data completeness has increased from 40% to 93.1%, stock-outs have decreased significantly (with a 5,000% drop from 2014-2021), and vaccination coverage has steadily improved, with Penta3 coverage increasing from 33% to 57%, as just a few examples.

February saw a number of developments, presentations, and publications from the DHIS2 community around the world. Here are a few highlights:

• WHO supported Iraq's Ministry of Health in launching a health digitization initiative, beginning with implementation of DHIS2 for immunization programs.
• HISP Uganda contributed to an article in PLOS Global Public Health on Uganda’s experience in establishing an electronic compendium for public health emergencies.
• DHIS2 and HISP experts from Tanzania, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Malawi presented at a BetterEHealth webinar on Interoperability for Health Information Systems.
• PAHO reported continued progress in implementing DHIS2 for hypertension monitoring in El Salvador through the HEARTS in the Americas program.
• The E-NNOVATE project shared updates on their work developing a global DHIS2 oncology module based on an ongoing electronic cancer registration pilot in Rwanda.

Do you have news you would like to share? Post it on the Community of Practice!

This month, the DHIS2 for Education team met the Global Partnership for Education Secretariat to present results from the Data Use Innovations GPE KIX project in the Gambia, Togo and Uganda, and participated in a panel discussion at the Comparative and International Education Society conference in Washington, DC.

We're also happy to report that DHIS2 was included in the UNESCO OpenEMIS Initiative, which promotes sustainable development of sector-wide national Education Management Information Systems (EMIS), nationally adapted innovation,  developing national capacities for local ownership, and system architectures to ensure data is available to stakeholders at all levels of the education system.

HISP Uganda also published a set of DHIS2-DEMIS end user training videos, including data entry with Android and web as well as creating data visualizations. While these trainings are specific to Uganda's system, they may also be of interest to other countries considering using DHIS2 for Education.

The HISP Centre is organizing several free online events with our partners in March. Register using the links below to join us on Zoom, or watch the live-stream directly and add your comments and questions on the DHIS2 Community of Practice.

• RapidPro-DHIS2 integration webinar with UNICEF (Wednesday 8 March, 14:00 CET): Register here
• Gavi DHIS2 for Immunization webinar on vaccination campaigns
  • English (Tuesday 7 March, 13:00 CET): Register here
  • Français (Jeudi 9 mars, 15:00 T.U): Inscrivez-vous ici

The DHIS2 integration team is happy to share the new DHIS2 Java SDK. Java is the team's programming language of choice for DHIS2 integration projects, but in using it, they found themselves frequently reinventing the wheel in getting data out of and into DHIS2. To improve productivity, they created the DHIS2 Java Software Development Kit (SDK), an open-source library that provides a fluent-like interface for creating, fetching, modifying, and deleting DHIS2 resources through the the DHIS2 Web API. Check out the blog post to learn about how you can use the DHIS2 Java SDK.

Keep your DHIS2 software and apps up to date! Find out more about the latest patch releases and updates below, and add your comments and questions about the latest releases on the DHIS2 Community of Practice.

• DHIS version 2.39.1.1 (Hotfix): Read the release notes
• Android Capture version 2.7.1.1 (Hotfix): Read the release notes

If you are responsible for creating or evaluating budgets and plans for large-scale DHIS2 implementations, or are just interested in learning more about implementation considerations from a planning perspective, we invite you to sign up for our new Level 2 self-paced online course, which provides useful tools, guidance, insights and best practices from the DHIS2 experts at the HISP Centre. 

We're happy to share that WHO has published a training package to improve the quality of routine health facility data through building capacity in the monthly use of DHIS2-based data quality (DQ) tools. The package includes tutorials with related exercises and examples on the DHIS2 DQ demo database. Read more on the Community of Practice.

You can also learn more about using the WHO-DHIS2 DQ tool, and other features that support data quality in DHIS2, in our online Data Quality Academy.

We have a lot of exciting in-person Academy courses coming up in the second quarter of 2023, including several new and updated courses, including:

Level 1 Academies:

• 24-29 April 2023: Ferramentas de análise (Comunidade portuguesa)
• 8-12 May 2023: Tracker Configuration (East Africa)
• May 2023: Android Configuration & Use (Location TBA)

Level 2 Academies: 

• 1-5 May 2023: Routine Health Information Systems (RHIS) (Middle East)
• 8-12 May 2023: Maps (Location TBA)
• June 2023: Community Health Information Systems (Location TBA)

Visit our website to see the current 2023 Academy schedule, and sign up for the Community of Practice to receive an announcement as soon as registration opens.

This month in our #CoPmonthly post, we share some of the discussions that most engaged DHIS2 community members in February, including announcements of our new online course, integration webinar, developer meetup, and mapping tools.  As always, we're also happy to recognize our most active and helpful users from the past month. Explore these topics and more in the #CoPmonthly!

February was a short month, so the next meetup is already coming up: 8 March 11:00 CET! This month, we're thrilled to be featuring a talk on Flutter App Development using the DHIS2 API by Eric Chingalo from HISP Tanzania.

But that's not all! We'll also be discussing the 2023 DHIS2 App Competition. and how you can join in. Even if you participated in last year's competition, there will be plenty of valuable insights to be gained by attending, as we will be changing things up this year.

So mark your calendars for March 8th at 11:00 CET and join us for an exciting and informative Meetup. And if you're interested in sharing your own work at an upcoming event, please don't hesitate to reach out to our Developer Advocate Rene Pot at rene@dhis2.org. We can't wait to see you there!

Not yet on the invite list for the meetup? Sign up here