….Platform designed to leverage on 50m  candidates data
By Gabriel Dike
The West African Examinations Council (WAEC) on Wednesday launched a new platform, EDUSTAT to help stakeholders’ source and use over 50 million database for different educational purposes.
Speaking at the unveiling of EDUSTAT platform, WAEC Head of the National Office (HNO) Mr. Patrick Areghan, said the platform would enable stakeholders source for different data on statistics of exams conducted by the council as well as performance of students.
Areghan said the launch of the new Educational Statistics (EDUSTAT) platform, is designed to ease access to quality data and insights in the educational sector.
According to him, the innovation was done to take the edge off the manual access to data by stakeholders, improve the quality of service delivery and generate more revenue for the Council.
He added: “WAEC Nigeria again leverages technology, detailed data analysis and insights, to establish itself as a leading light in the educational sector and a future brand by introducing this educational statistical platform. The access to statistical data analysis, its collation, interpretation and presentation cannot be different.
“Businesses and organizations alike need every edge and advantage they can get to improve service delivery, thanks to the rapidly changing markets, economic uncertainties, shifting political landscape, customer-focus, and even the global pandemic, which have made statistical analysis more sought-after by researchers, for fact analysis and findings.
“As an examining body that has survived the centrifugal forces of the colonial era and remains the foremost examining body in the West African sub-region, with a vast and rich database, it has become expedient to completely migrate from the manual way of interpreting data to a more sophisticated and advanced mode of data interpretation through technology.”
Areghan stressed that for many stakeholders, lack of quality data has led to inconsistencies and multiple data copies in education. While others includes incorrect data and the absence of analytics have led to false facts resulting in bad decisions making and loss of revenue, in some cases.
He said the council identified these issues and sought to solve the problem through its new EDUSTAT product, which addresses poor infrastructure and the manual process of assessing educational insights and statistics.
The WAEC boss said the new product, EDUSTAT, is borne out of the desire to provide stakeholders, such as researchers, funding agencies, government institutions, school administrators and parents with a reliable platform that provides educational insights collected from multiple sources and delivered in simplified graphs, summaries, and dashboards which help them enhance their decisions.
Aregthan described EDUSTAT as an innovative educational statistics platform designed to leverage WAEC’s comprehensive and reliable database of over 50 million candidates who have been tested over the years.
“This platform results from years of research, development, and collaboration, and we are confident that it will revolutionize how data is accessed,’’ he added.
The HNO described “education as one of the most important investments we can make as a society. It is the key to unlocking opportunities, improving our lives and driving economic growth. However, to achieve the best outcomes for our students, we need to be able to measure and analyze educational data effectively. This is where EDUSTAT platform comes in.”
He said the new platform would change views about data analysis by providing users with easy-to-use tools to analyze and visualize data as well as offers a wide range of features that will benefit our users.
Areghan said the platform would provide government agencies, schools and researchers detailed statistics on student enrollment, graduation rates, performance, student-level data on academic performance, attendance, demographic information and intuitive way to track and analyze educational statistics.
The Managing Director of Sidmach Technologies Nigeria Ltd, Mr. Chigioke Eke, assured WAEC management that the partnership would continue to yield positive result.
Eke explained work on the new platform started 2018, stressing that the data is reliable and authentic.