By Mabinty M. Kamara
The premises of the Sierra Leone Embassy in Guinea was one of the examination centers that hosted this year’s National Primary School Examinations (NPSE) which was held on Monday 3rd August.
The Chancery Building in Kipe, a suburb of the Guinean capital, Conakry, hosted 350 Sierra Leonean pupils who had been attending English schools in the French speaking country.
The NPSE marks the completion of Primary School education in Sierra Leone. Students who pass the examination proceeds to Secondary School.
While this is not the first time the examination is being held in Guinea, which is home to thousands of Sierra Leoneans, some of whom migrated there during the 1991-2002 civil war, it is the first time for the embassy’s premises to be used as a center, according to embassy officials.
Alimamay Hassan Bangura, Sierra Leone’s Ambassador to Guinea, told Politico that the embassy started hosting the examination last year but not on the scale of this year.
“This is the first time that the examination has been taken in the embassy on a large scale, though we started last year but in a small scale,” he said.
According to Bangura, the examination was supervised by the West Africa Examination Council (WAEC), alongside officials from the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Schools with the goal of ensuring that it’s taken in a credible atmosphere.
The ambassador said the regional examination body itself requested for the exam to be taken within the embassy premises which is Sierra Leonean territory.
According to Ambassador Bangura, there are over 20 Sierra Leonean established schools in Guinea, which uses the English language as a medium of communication. He said over the years they had faced challenges in trying to access examination centers in the boarder District of Kambia in Sierra Leone, with the absent of WAEC in the host country.
WAEC comprises membership of the five English speaking West African countries.
Bangura said traveling to Kambia to take part in the examination had exposed the candidates to challenges including the poor road network between Guinea and Sierra Leone, as well as accommodation problem when they got to Kambia.
“So when I was appointed as ambassador to this country, one of my key priorities was to have a WAEC center here in Guinea so that we can help our kids and protect them from all of these challenges,” Bangura said on a telephone interview.
Amidst reports of challenges in some examination centers in Sierra Leone itself, the Guinean experience was entirely smooth, according to reports.
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