Education think tank, Africa Education Watch has defended its report on the 2020 WASSCE that revealed massive leakages insisting the report was meant to bring the necessary reforms to the examination body.

The think tank has been criticized by the West African Examination Council (WAEC) who say although personal contact details of its examiners were leaked days before the start of last year's WASSCE, its robust system ensured that it did not impact the marking of scripts and subsequent outcome of the results.

In an interaction with the Executive Director of Africa Education Watch, Kofi Asare, he said the focus of the report is not WAEC but the Education Ministry so as to bring an end to the malpractices.

“I think I understand WAECs concern, but unfortunately the focus of our report is not WAEC, our focus is to work with the Ministry of Education by providing factual evidence of the root causes of malpractices so that the Ministry in executing the President’s agenda to reform the WAEC and the assessment sector, will be guided by such data to confront the root causes of examination fraud and not necessarily the symptoms that WAEC has been confronting over the past 10, 15 years and so WAEC may not be happy but unfortunately they are not our target.

He further argued that "our target or our audience Is the Ministry of Education and we have been engaging the Minister on this,” Kofi Asare explained.

This comes after the Africa Education Watch stated that investigations they conducted revealed two categories of irregularities that occurred during the 2020 WASSCE; leakage in examiners’ contact details and widespread leakage in examination questions.

The report stated that the think tank intercepted an excel spreadsheet on social media, which contained a total of 1,520 names of WAEC examiners for the WASSCE 2020.

“That leaked list had the specific names, schools, subject areas, telephone numbers and email addresses of certified WAEC examiners. Our checks, unfortunately, confirmed the data; the purported information in circulation on social media, sadly, was an authentic document from WAEC.”

On leaked papers, Africa Education Watch stated that they intercepted some questions in almost every paper except Integrated Science and Social Studies, where the leaked papers proved to be fake.