Online payment of school fees: Secondary education ministry adopts national matricule for students.

Information patterning to the new payment procedures was unveiled in Douala on Thursday August 1, 2024.

This was during the session the Minister of Secondary Education, Prof Nalova Lyonga, organised with partner operators, regarding the collection of school fees.

In essence, the ministry has partnered with operators who are responsible for the collection of tuition and examination fees via their different platforms.

The money which is collected through Mobile Money channels and then transferred to the Ministry of Secondary Education with appropriate listing, files and proves to the ministry’s account with Afriland First Bank 

The onboarding session, came six years after the ministry introduced Mobile Money as a suitable means of paying tuition. 

In her opening remarks during the Douala meeting, Minister Nalova Lyonga recalled the hesitancy with which parents and guardians had to accept the system. 

“But then, it worked till now and it’s still working,” the member of government said. 

The system, she reiterated, has helped the government bring in a very important innovation in collecting fees.

Spanding through, the minister said it was time to make things better and so by adopting a unique identifier.

“We thought we would make it even better than what obtains today and to make it better, it only to have a unique identifier for every child coming to the secondary education in Cameroon,” Prof Nalova told the press. 

She went on to explain that: “They will have one single number that will identify the students. So, we will be able to do things smarter and stamp out the fraud that is all over the place. It’s a matter of improvement, that's what we are trying to do”.

The minister thanked partners for the support and the government for giving the ministry such magnitude of support in their journey through online tuition payments which came to be at a time no one believed it could be possible.

She said though the old system recorded great strides in revenue collection and curbing corruption in school milieus, it had so much challenges. 

Going by Ako Joelle Agborndang, Information and Technology consultant with the Ministry of Secondary Education, in the last academic year, they had to deal with the emergence of impostors collecting money in the name of the operators. 

The operators, he disclosed, had to bear the cost while some schools suffered setbacks as parents could not recover money paid to fake agents. 

Moreover, the system proved to be even more complicated for operators who had to deploy printers and other costly responsibilities. 

Again, schools could not get data of the number of students who have complied with tuition on time. 

Notwithstanding, the innovation which comes with the unique identifier, will solve the above-mentioned lapses.

The journey of payment with unique identifier 

Parents of students or the students themselves need to login to the online portal of MINESEC called “Carte scolaire.cm”. This platform will serve them a go to search icon for their matricules. 

Students who registered last year, will not have to enter any other information, like their names, class, date of birth amongst others. The matricule will then serve as a unique identifier. They will simply enter the unique number and the system will tell them who they are. 

They can then proceed to make payments either via MTN Mobile Money, Orange Money or CAMPOST or western Union. 

An added advantage is that schools will no longer have to ask for the list of students who have paid their fees from the different operators. 

The principals or accountants can just login to the online platform and they will have a list of all their students at the comfort of their offices. This unique identifier will not change even if the student changes classroom or moves to another school. 

This story was first published in The Guardian Post issue N0: 3190 of August 05, 2024