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Claim: In a post, a Facebook user, Bawumia Ba Kwame, claims candidates will pay GH¢ 550 as a registration fee for the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) in 2025.
Verdict: Misleading. DUBAWA’s findings reveal no authorised ¢550 registration fee for BECE 2025. However, the Ghana Education Service has noticed that some heads are demanding unauthorised student fees, which must be refunded.
Full Text
The West African Examination Council (WAEC) oversees junior and senior high school final exams in Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Gambia.
The exam body, headquartered in Ghana, has been in the news for various reasons in the past two months. Recently, the High Court in Ghana ordered the examination body to release withheld results for some WASSCE 2024 candidates.
A new year brings a fresh batch of final-year students looking forward to their final-year examinations. Candidates must take these examinations to progress to higher levels of education.
In a post, a Facebook user, Bawumia Ba Kwame, claims that parents of BECE candidates will pay GH¢ 550 for registration to take the exams in 2025. As of Feb. 12, 2025, the post had garnered 438 likes, reactions, and 284 comments.
Find other social media posts suggesting that candidates will pay GH¢ 550 as registration fees here and here.
DUBAWA recognised the potential of such posts to disinform and mislead and decided to probe further.
Verification
Matters regarding final-year exams, candidates, results, and the entire process have always been of national interest. Any of such issues gain massive attention from credible media outlets in Ghana. However, a Google keyword search to determine if registration fees have been announced for this year’s BECE yielded no supporting publications by any credible media outlet in Ghana.
The most recent publications concerning BECE focused on the Ghana Education Service (GES) announcement of the 2025 exam dates. BECE is scheduled from June 9 to June 16, 2025.
Further, we searched WAEC and GES’ websites for publications on registration fees for BECE 2025. As of Feb. 12, 2025, no such news was found.
However, in a press statement, the GES expressed that it is “unauthorised” for any head of a Basic school to charge a fee for the exams this year.
“Management wishes to emphasise that these fees are unauthorised, and all Heads are advised to stop this practice immediately. Regional Directors are instructed to alert District Directors to monitor the situation and caution all Heads of Basic schools,” the presser signed by the public relations officer of the GES stated.
While the GES categorically denied approving ¢550 as a registration fee, it did not deny parents’ payments to school heads for registration purposes.
The statement added that no school head had been authorised to demand fees from parents for registration, and if such payments have been made, the heads must take steps to refund them.
DUBAWA tried contacting Cassandra Twum Ampofo, head of the GES’ public relations unit, for further clarification. As of the time of publication, she has yet to respond to our query.
However, the researcher dug into the GES’s Facebook page and found some responses to several Facebook users’ inquiries about authorised or approved fees. The official handle responded that there were no approved exam fees this year.
“There are no approved fees. GES would have stated that in the release. Thank you,” the official handle stated in response to several Facebook users.
DUBAWA’s further checks with some schools indicate that the government has absorbed the registration fees for the past seven years, and the policy on registration is not different at the moment. However, parents have been responsible for the fees associated with procuring passport pictures for their wards during registration.
Conclusion
The claim that candidates for BECE 2025 must pay GH¢ 550 before they register is misleading. According to GES, there is no authorised registration fee for BECE this year.
