With just two days to the commencement of the 2018 edition of the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE), the Garu District in the Upper East Region has not recorded any case of a female candidate being pregnant ahead of the examination.

This is an improvement over last year’s situation when the then Garu-Tempane District recorded over 10 pregnancy cases prior to the BECE.

When he was asked how the district came by the improvement, Emmanuel Avoka Asore, the District Chief Executive for Garu, said in an interview that the assembly had to support the Ghana Education Service to screen the candidates before the registration.

“Usually, those who get pregnant before the examination are those who don’t do well in class; they go wayward right from the onset. We have screened the candidates; indeed, we got all the bad nuts out before the registration. So it is not common to find someone in JHS 3 pregnant.” He disclosed.

The 2018 BECE is expected to commence on Monday, June 4, 2018, across all the districts in the Upper East Region, with English Language being the first paper.

This year, the DCE for Garu District, with the help of the Ghana Education Service and other stakeholders in the district, has put in place measures to ensure that this year’s BECE results for the area get better than last year.

According to Mr Avoka, if no case of pregnancy is recorded by the end of the BECE, it will be a big success for the district in their quest to improve on the performance of students at the BECE level.

He said the Garu District Assembly has empowered the various circuit supervisors in the district to play their monitoring roles over teachers and students effectively.

From this year, basic schools in the district will no long promote students in a “wholesale” manner, rather, all students, especially from Upper Primary to Junior High School, will have to justify their promotion by passing their terminal, mock and external examinations that will be conducted for them.

“We came together and took a firm decision on the calibre of candidates we were going to register for the BECE,” Mr Avoka said.

In the past, the Garu-Tempane district did not perform well at the BECE level and the current chief executive has vowed to ensure that the situation changes in this year’s results.