The National Examination Council has e-Verify, an electronic platform that will certify the results of its examinations. The council made this announcement at an event in Abuja that featured representatives from the Federal Ministry of Education, the Secretary of the Government of the Federation, and other important personalities.
e-Verify will dissuade people from using falsified results for university admission and employment purposes. Aside from checkmating result forgery, e-Verify will simplify the result verification process. Before now, any request for NECO to verify a candidate’s results had to be directed to the head office in Niger state.
Speaking at the launch of e-Verify, NECO’s Registrar Prof. Dantani Wushishi claimed e-Verify would provide quick verification of results alongside other benefits like increased confidence, lower chances of forgery, and greater operational efficiency.
“The ‘NECO e-Verify’ is an Online Result Verification solution that guarantees instant authentication of academic and basic information about prospective candidates for admission and employment into academic institutions and workplaces respectively,” he shared. According to him, the increase in the number of requests for result verification from institutions in both Nigeria and abroad inspired this product’s creation.
Between 2020 and 2022, Wushishi revealed that the examination body had received result verification and confirmation inquiries from 64 academic institutions across 37 countries. In Nigeria during the exact timeframe, the NECO registrar also shared that the same requests emerged from 72 institutions.
Meanwhile, the federal government has informed the heads of tertiary institutions to start using the e-Verify portal for candidates of the recent NECO senior school certificate examination. This was made public during e-Verify’s debut.
“Vice Chancellors of universities, rectors of polytechnics, provosts of colleges of education, head of other tertiary institutions, including Innovation Enterprises Institutions are therefore mandated to make use of NECO e-Verify software for verifying all candidates that will be admitted who sat in neco exam,” said David Andrew Adejo, permanent secretary of the Ministry of Education. He added that this initiative would ensure that only candidates with authentic results would be considered for admission.
It’s worth noting that NECO isn’t the first examination body in the country to launch a verification portal. The West African Examination Council (WAEC) rolled out a digital platform designed to simplify the issuance and authentication of certificates. The portal can also be used for recovering forgotten examination numbers, a criterion for checking results.
Read also: WAEC makes NIN compulsory for exam registration in 2022
How e-verify would work
Providing a walkaround of the platform, Sule Onu, an IT specialist, said e-Verify features both landing and unlanding pages. Users will have two verification steps: bulk and instant. To verify a result, users have to apply by providing personal information like name, phone number, email address, and password.
At this point, NECO will send messages through the registered phone number and email address with directions for further steps. Subsequently, the user will be directed to a page where they’ll pay a certain amount to receive a token.
Protection from future cybersecurity attacks
As more public services become digitized, the government must future-proof its services against threat actors. Recall that the now-former Minister of Communication and Digital Economy Isa Pantami claimed that the servers of Nigeria’s electoral body recorded over 12 million hack attempts during the 2023 general elections.
As such, it’s unsurprising that Chris Maiyaki, the acting Executive Secretary of the National University Commission encouraged NECO to constantly monitor the platform to guarantee its durability and protection from cybercriminals looking to hack the database.
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