The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) has said it will deploy an Electronic Certificate Management System to facilitate the issuance of certificates to candidates, following the increase of abandoned certificates in their office.
The council’s Head, Public Affairs, Damianus Ojijeogu disclosed on Thursday in Lagos.
According to him, the online system will enable the council to print certificates of candidates only on request.
“With this in place, it will assist the council in the decongesting backlog of certificates lying fallow for several years with very few owners coming up to collect them.
“With this in place, any candidate that wants his or her result will go online to make a request and leave an address of where it would be delivered.
“It does not matter where they wrote the examination.
“The process has reached an advanced stage and hopefully, by 2019, the mechanism would be deployed,’’ Ojijeogu said.
He said the deployment of the electronic device became necessary following the slow response by candidates in collecting their certificates several years after sitting for the West Africa Senior School Certificate Examination.
Ojijeogu said that WAEC has been appealing to candidates yet to collect their certificates, but that the response had been very low.
“In 2014 alone, we placed several advertorials in some newspapers appealing with those concerned to come forward for their certificates as they are taking up too much space in our offices.
“We did need not to get any meaningful response.