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This guide walks you through confirming your first WAEC certificate using the API. You will need your Institution account and API Secret key ready before you begin.

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Prerequisites

  • An Institution account on the Digital Certificate platform
  • An API Secret key — generate one from your Institution profile. See Authentication for details.
  • curl or any HTTP client

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Steps

1

Get your API Secret key

Log in to the Digital Certificate platform and navigate to your Institution profile. Generate an API Secret key. You will pass this key in the X-DigiCert-Secret header of every request.The platform has two environments — use the sandbox base URL and a sandbox key while developing, then switch to production when you are ready to go live.
EnvironmentBase URL
Sandboxhttps://api.sandbox.smartdocument.org/api/v1/external
Productionhttps://api.waec.org/api/v1/external
Store your API Secret key securely — in an environment variable or secrets manager. Never hard-code it in your application or commit it to version control.
2

Confirm a certificate

Send a POST request to /certificate/confirm with the candidate’s country, candidate number, and examination year. You can include multiple certificates in a single request.The example below uses the sandbox URL. Replace it with the production URL when you go live.
curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.sandbox.smartdocument.org/api/v1/external/certificate/confirm \
  --header 'X-DigiCert-Secret: YOUR_SANDBOX_SECRET_KEY' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{
    "certificates": [
      {
        "country": "NG",
        "candidate_number": "4251212052",
        "year": "2022"
      }
    ]
  }'
A successful response returns 200 OK with the confirmation results:
{
  "status": "OK",
  "message": "Request completed",
  "data": [
    {
      "is_error": false,
      "request": {
        "country": "NG",
        "candidate_number": "4251212052",
        "year": "2022"
      },
      "message": "Certificate already verified.",
      "result": {
        "id": "ea9065b4-563b-48c7-a98f-0594948fc415",
        "country": "NG",
        "country_name": "Nigeria",
        "status": "Match Found",
        "candidate_number": "4251212052",
        "year": "2022",
        "certificate": {
          "surname": "AYANTUNJI",
          "firstname": "ELIZABETH",
          "othernames": "BUNMI",
          "candidate_number": "4251212052",
          "period": "WASSCE (SC) 2022",
          "year": "2022",
          "dob": "2003-10-04",
          "gender": "FEMALE",
          "center": "ISIU SENIOR GRAMMAR SCHOOL, ISIU",
          "certificate_number": "33607486",
          "exam_title": "WASSCE (SC) 2022",
          "results": [
            { "subject": "ENGLISH LANGUAGE", "grade": "D7" },
            { "subject": "GENERAL MATHEMATICS", "grade": "E8" }
          ]
        },
        "created_at": "2026-05-21T07:39:52.000000Z"
      }
    }
  ]
}
The API always returns 200 OK even when a certificate is not found. Check each entry’s result field — a null value means no match was found for that candidate.
3

Check your confirmation history

Retrieve a log of all confirmations on your account using GET /certificate/confirmation-history.
curl --request GET \
  --url 'https://api.sandbox.smartdocument.org/api/v1/external/certificate/confirmation-history?year=2022' \
  --header 'X-DigiCert-Secret: YOUR_SANDBOX_SECRET_KEY'

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Next steps

Certificates

Understand how confirmation records are structured and what data is returned.

Confirm guide

Detailed guide on confirming certificates in bulk and handling not-found results.

API reference

Full endpoint reference with every parameter, response schema, and example.