Over 4.4 Million Students to Take BECE by July 2024 During President Nana Addo’s Term. This has never happened in the 34-year history of the BECE under one government serving 8 years in Ghana.
In the last seven (7) years, close to 3.8 million junior high school students have taken the Basic Education Examination Certificate Examination (BECE). Over the past seven years, the number of candidates has consistently increased. The number has increased year after year, except for 2022, when the numbers dropped, but this picked up to over 600,000 candidates in 2023.
In 2017, which was the first year of the newly introduced Free SHS, a total of 468,060 students took the examination. The number shot up to 509,824 in 2018 and continued to rise marginally in 2019 to 517,332. In 2020, the figures were 572,000. In 2021, it was 572,167. This fell to 553,408 in 2022 before shooting up in 2023 to 602,457.
According to the data analysis, candidates increased by 28.7% from 2017 to 2023. WAEC has not yet made the 2024 BECE data public. We expect the candidates for the 2024 BECE to approximate the average of 542,178 students who wrote the BECE each year from 2017 to 2023. If that happened in July 2024, close to 4.4 million students would have written the BECE under President Akufo Addo, when over 90% of these learners benefited from the Free SHS.
The table presents the candidates who participated in the BECE from 2017 to 2023, along with the forecast for 2024.
| Year | Number of Candidates |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 468,060 |
| 2018 | 509,824 |
| 2019 | 517,332 |
| 2020 | 572,000 |
| 2021 | 572,167 |
| 2022 | 553,408 |
| 2023 | 602,457 |
| 2024 | 542,178 |
Trends Observed:
- Over the years, there has been a general upward trend in the number of candidates, with a notable increase each year except for a slight drop from 2021 to 2022.
- The largest increase was from 2017 to 2018, and again from 2019 to 2020.
- Despite a slight decrease in 2022, the number of candidates reached its highest in 2023.
The data indicates a steady increase in the number of candidates sitting for the BECE exams from 2017 to 2023, with an overall growth of 28.7% over this period. Over these years, the total number of students who have written the exam is 3,795,248.
