Foreign Universities and Institutions in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and South Africa are actively requesting verification of results issued by the National Examinations Council (NECO), the body's registrar has confirmed, signalling growing international recognition for the Nigerian examination board.

Prof. Dantani Wushishi, Registrar and Chief Executive of NECO, disclosed this in a brochure marking 25 years since the council's establishment, stating that such verification requests are treated with urgency because they reflect the acceptability of NECO results within the global education system.

Beyond its membership of the International Association for Educational Assessment (IAEA), Wushishi noted that NECO's results meet global academic and professional standards, with the council now operating in nine countries, including the Benin Republic, Niger Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire, Gabon, Togo, Burkina Faso and the United Kingdom.

Since its inception in 2000, NECO has recorded 28,222,218 candidate registrations, representing a 53.49% increase in enrolment.

Wushishi further described what he considered NECO's most consequential yet least acknowledged achievement: ending the dominance of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) over post primary assessments in Nigeria.

"Perhaps NECO's single most consequential achievement is one that is easy to overlook. It ended WAEC's monopoly over post primary examinations in Nigeria. Before 1999, WAEC administered senior secondary examinations for the entire country, a body headquartered outside Nigeria and designed to serve multiple Anglophone West African nations simultaneously," he stated.

He added that critics had long argued the arrangement compromised Nigeria's educational sovereignty and left the system ill suited to domestic curriculum priorities.

"NECO changed this by conducting the Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (SSCE) for both internal and external candidates, alongside the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) and the National Common Entrance Examination (NCEE), creating genuine competition in the assessment space," Wushishi stated.

He added: "The data tells this story vividly from its maiden examination in 2000, NECO grew its internal SSCE candidature from approximately 890,000 in 2000 to over 1.2million by 2022, a cumulative total exceeding 24 million candidates across the period."