Over 509,000 Ghanaian Students Join West African Peers for WASSCE On Wednesday
Ghana’s final-year Senior High School students are stepping back onto the regional examination stage alongside their West African counterparts for the first time in years, as the 2026 West African Senior School Certificate Examination for School Candidates gets fully underway tomorrow with the Oral English paper.
A total of 509,862 candidates will sit this year’s WASSCE-SC across Ghana, according to figures released by the West African Examinations Council.
The cohort comprises 225,274 males and 284,588 females — the largest group of Ghanaian students to participate in the synchronised May-June sitting since the examination calendar was disrupted several years ago.
The 2026 edition had already begun with practical sessions and project work covering subjects such as Visual Arts and Home Economics, but tomorrow’s Oral English paper marks the first written examination that all candidates will participate in simultaneously — and the first time since 2021 that Ghanaian students are writing alongside Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone and The Gambia under a unified schedule.
The return to the May-June calendar represents the culmination of years of effort by WAEC member countries to realign their academic timetables following disruptions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The outbreak forced the 2020 examination to be pushed back to a July-September window, and the 2021 sitting ran from August through October. In the years that followed, member nations worked to progressively synchronise their calendars, with 2026 marking a full return to the traditional regional sitting period.
Regional breakdown of candidates:
The Ashanti Region leads all regions with 127,702 candidates — 57,885 males and 69,817 females — making it by far the most represented region in this year’s examination.
The Eastern Region follows with 70,099 candidates (29,810 males and 40,289 females), while the combined Bono, Bono East and Ahafo regions account for 67,739 candidates (29,658 males and 38,081 females).
The Central Region contributes 61,303 candidates, and Greater Accra follows with 48,099 — comprising 22,418 males and 25,681 females.
The Volta Region has 41,622 candidates (19,261 males and 22,361 females), while the Oti Region and Western North together account for 35,620 candidates (14,480 males and 21,140 females).
The Northern Region, which encompasses the North East, Savannah and Northern Region proper, will be represented by 33,155 candidates.
The Upper East Region has 15,192 candidates (6,093 males and 9,099 females), and the Upper West Region rounds off the national count with 9,249 candidates (3,985 males and 5,266 females).
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