Highlights from our 6th annual DHIS2 Symposium!

From September 1- 17, BAO Systems hosted its 6th annual DHIS2 Symposium. The DHIS2 Symposium brings together representatives from global development agencies, governments, and NGOs with a shared vision of data driven decision making. It is an opportunity to interact with peers and thought leaders in health systems strengthening, monitoring and evaluation, and analytics. The DHIS2 Symposium highlights how DHIS2 is being used in creative ways to solve common challenges in collecting, managing, visualizing, and most importantly, using data to drive decision making and impact. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced organizations to be innovative, flexible, and to quickly adapt to the “new” normal. In light of the COVID-19 turmoil and with the health and well-being of the DHIS2 Community in mind, the Symposium was hosted virtually for the first time. We leveraged webinar streaming tools and developed our own DHIS2 Symposium application in collaboration with Cvent that hosts all the insightful content provided by this year’s speakers. The online format allowed an even broader audience to attend than ever before, and enabled us to spark conversation with a more diverse crowd. This is what the DHIS2 Symposium is all about; connecting with each other to share experiences and learn from one another.

The DHIS2 Symposium program spanned three weeks and included over 50 hours of content for attendees to consume. The program featured plenary and breakout sessions, panel sessions, the Experts Lounge, an optional DHIS2 Events & Tracker Analytics training, as well as interactive sessions, Kahoot, and live polling. With 69 speakers, 8 sponsors, and 266 unique participants, this was our largest and most comprehensive DHIS2 Symposium to date. 

The DHIS2 Symposium team at BAO Systems was excited to successfully translate the original two-day DHIS2 Symposium to an online format and look forward to providing more online events and content in the future; not as an interim solution to accommodate the pandemic, but as a long-term strategy to reach new members of and interact with the DHIS2 Community.

Check-out our DHIS2 Symposium web page to learn more about the 2020 event and future editions.