The West African Examination Council (WAEC) has said it will begin to make its certificates available to candidates of the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) immediately after their results are released.
Head of National Office of WAEC, Patrick Areghan, revealed this at official lunching organised by the exam body in Lagos on Tuesday.
The examination body had announced that it plans to launch digital certificate portal.
Areghan explained that the digital certificate platform would be launched on Thursday, October 20, 2022, and that the process would initially be available to those candidates that sat for the examinations not earlier than 1999 and till date. He added that candidates who wrote the exams before 1999 would be considered much later.
‘’If we announce the release of results today, the certificates will automatically be ready for release. It may just take a year to transit because the certificates we have now are going to be treated, but immediately after they are treated, they will be available in the database. The next one, that will be 2023 or 2024, immediately we release the results the certificate will be ready.”
Areghan further explained that the new digital certificate cannot be tampered with or falsified, adding that it will help checkmate fakers.
According to him the digital platform will help “solve the problem of theft”, as it will allow candidates lost their initial certificates to get another copy.
“Whether your certificate was burnt or lost to flood or eaten by termite, you don’t have to go through the stress of recovering it. Just pick up your phone and log on to our website and it comes straight from the WAEC database.
“We have solved the problem of theft. We have saved you the headache of carrying the hard copies of your certificate. And the good thing that will come out of this is, by the time we take a final decision and perfect everything if we release the results today, I can tell you that the certificates are ready. It is just to roll them out,” WAEC National Head Office Director explained.
WAEC described the initiative as a mobile and web-based application that has powerful features. It was designed to help candidates, individuals, and institutions/organizations access, share, request, confirm certificates and recover forgotten WAEC candidates’ examination numbers.
The WAEC Digital Certificate Platform can be accessed through www.waec.org. It also has mobile application for Android and iOS devices which can be downloaded on Google Play Store and Apply Store respectively.
On the conduct of the exams, the WAEC boss identified insecurity as one of the challenges the exam body was facing across the country.
“Places where you go to by road, you now have to fly because of insecurity. Almost everybody in WAEC now flies. We are the greatest movers of leg and materials. We stay in hotels. And you know for security reasons you can no longer stay in anyhow hotel. You have to stay in a safe area. There are some places you cannot conduct exams without the physical presence of the police and the Nigerian Army.
“When you go to the East due to what I will call ethnic separatism; you go to the north where you have banditry and insurgency; how do you conduct exams in those areas? Thank God some state governments cooperate with us. If not for the military and the brigade command in Yobe and Borno States, we would not have been able to conduct the examination. In the East, we thank the DSS. And generally, all over the country, we thank the Inspector-General of Police.
“We take the exam to every nook and cranny of the country. Our exam is not such that you gather people together in one central location. There is no facility like that in Nigeria. Wherever the school is located, you must go there to conduct the examination. That is a great challenge. Even in some places where you don’t have banditry, gunmen or insurgency, the roads are not good. These are the challenges we have in trying to serve the Nigerian child.”