Chang’anamuno
The Malawi National Examinations Board (MANEB) has launched an online system for registration of candidates and payment of examination fees.
The system will be effectively rolled out across the country this year and no school will register candidates or receive examination fees on behalf of MANEB.
This follows the pilot testing of the system in previous years.
The system was designed to deal with challenges that candidates and the board were facing including fee swindling and mistakes in names and identity documents.
The challenges sometimes affected children who failed to write examinations despite having paid the fees.
Speaking at the launch, Deputy Minister of Education Monica Chang’anamuno said MANEB has introduced a remarkable change, but for this change to achieve its intended objectives, Malawians must embrace the change.
“In this regard, I commend schools that have assisted parents with the technology when necessary. However, I would like to urge all schools to desist from collecting examination fees in cash from candidates. There is no need for this. The message from MANEB is clear that the responsibility of paying examination fees to MANEB rests with the guardians or the candidates themselves. I am therefore requesting all guardians and parents to do as advised by MANEB,” explained Chang’anamuno.
She added that a major advantage of the e-registration and e-payment system is the transparency of the system.
“The invoice which is generated shows the amount of fees which a candidate is required to pay for examinations. This limits the opportunity for criminally inflating the costs and stealing money from unsuspecting parents, guardians or students,” said Chang’anamuno.
According to Chang’anamuno, the Ministry is committed to supporting the Education Sectors’ endeavours to digitize their operations in order to achieve excellence and effectiveness in service delivery.
In her remarks, MANEB Executive Director, Prof. Dorothy Nampota noted that the use of excel-sheets had so many challenges that were affecting their operations in many ways, such as delays in having stable data which they use for determining copies of examination papers to print and loss of revenue through the embezzled examination fees.
“We had a number of challenges like, so many errors made because it was done manually, some schools embezzle examination fees after collecting them from candidates and wrong candidate details such as name spelling, gender, wrong subject choices just to name afew,” she said.
She further added that the new system will help the schools to correct errors on candidates particulars in real time unlike in the current practice whereby schools write to MANEB requesting it to effect some amendments.
“There is going to be improved transparency and accountability in the collection of examination fees since the fees will be paid directly to MANEB. This will assist in proper planning and implementation of examination related activities at MANEB,” explained Nampota.
So far MANEB has made agreements with five banks and two mobile phone companies for e-registration and e-payment.
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