The Gambia EMIS has mainly consisted of a manual, paper based reporting system maintained from the national level. The recent policy changes, which emphasize social inclusion in quality learning, call for an “EMIS shift”, which includes the development of a digital national Teacher Register, Learner Records, and the decentralization of key EMIS functions to regions and schools. Empirically, this paper concerns the steps taken towards a decentralized EMIS in the Gambia as we follow the initial implementation of the individual learner admission and registration system in 200 schools. We synthesize previous IS centralization and decentralization literature into an analytical framework, which we apply to make sense of the case findings and provide recommendations for future EMIS decentralization initiatives.