Dear DHIS2 Community,
I am facing a challenge with data approval when working with partners who need to perform approval at the province level.
Here’s the situation:
Our org unit structure looks like this:
We have two partners who support specific districts and need to approve data at the province level. Partner 1 supports District A1 and District B1, while Partner 2 supports District A2 and District B2.
The Challenge:
- Currently, the partners are not included in the org unit hierarchy. Should I add them as org units? Or is there a better approach to handling data approval for partners who are not part of the org unit hierarchy?
- If I do add the partners to the org unit hierarchy under the National level, should I create duplicate provinces under each partner’s branch, like this?
I understand that duplicating provinces is generally not recommended. What is the best way to handle data approval with this senior for partners in DHIS2 without causing issues in the org unit hierarchy?
I’d appreciate any insights.
Thank you!
Pomi
Hi Pomi,
First of all, I wholeheartedly agree, never, ever distort an org unit hierarchy with other factors (eg donor funding) - that nearly always comes back to bite you during analysis etc! 
I would in fact gently question them about the appropriateness of the design they are asking you to implement. If this is a HMIS, then it is extremely important that the government is the sole approver for all data, not partners. This is important not just for data sovereignty and accountability, but also for practical reasons - for example, specific questions that are important to the partner but not to the government could then hold up approval and dissemination of the whole national data set.
My guess is that partners want the right to approve this data for their own accountability processes, rather than because their approval is needed before the government can publish data? In which case this is a parallel approval process, and ideally shouldn’t be added as a blocking step in the government approval process - it should be done at the provincial level, probably outside of DHIS2.
Having said all of this, if you really want to insist on including partners in the approval process, there are options you could possibly use. A warning: I have never implemented this feature myself, so this is very theoretical advice! But my understanding is that the approvals process in DHIS2 allows for two-step approval, which might solve your problem. The two steps are ‘approval’ of data at any given level, and then ‘acceptance’ of that same data (which then freezes it) by the level above. So for your purposes:
- The provincial Ministry team would ‘approve’ the data for a province/month.
- The partner (with national-level approval permissions) would then ‘accept’ this same data for the province/month, thereby freezing it.
- The central Ministry (also with national-level approval permissions) would then ‘approve’ this data, releasing it for publication.
There are two small catches with this:
- Since acceptance is done at the national level, I’m pretty sure you would need to give these partners access at the national level of the org unit hierarchy, and there would then be nothing stopping them from ‘accepting’ each others’ data.
- If you switch on two-stage approvals in the System Settings app, then I think all approvals (including districts) will have this second ‘accept data’ step added, so provinces will have to ‘accept’ each district’s data before then ‘approving’ the overall province’s data.
As mentioned, I haven’t implemented this myself, so please do carefully test that it works as per the documentation before trying to implement it!
Cheers, Sam.
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Hi Pomi,
Another option would be to let the partner approve the data at the district level and essentially if they approve multiple districts within a province they are then approving provincial data which they are responsible for as well. I am not sure if this meets your use case but it does solve the problem of partners requiring access to Provinces or the National level in the hierarchy and cross partner approval possibilities.
The other challenge that you would have with provincial level approval is that usually you cannot approve data at a higher level until all the lower level data is approved so then you have a situation where the one will delay the other’s approval.
Hope this helps.
Elmarie
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Thank you so much, @SamuelJohnson and @Elmarie_Claasen, for your thoughtful responses! I truly appreciate your insights, and I believe adding the approval at the district level perfectly addresses my use case. 
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