Get Started with WAEC Certificate Digitization

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.

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

Steps

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.

Environment	Base URL
Sandbox	`https://api.smartdocument.org/api/v1/external`
Production	`https://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.

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.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.

Check your confirmation history

Retrieve a log of all confirmations on your account using GET /certificate/confirmation-history.

curl --request GET \
  --url 'https://api.smartdocument.org/api/v1/external/certificate/confirmation-history?year=2022' \
  --header 'X-DigiCert-Secret: YOUR_SANDBOX_SECRET_KEY'

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.

Get Started

Core Concepts

Guides

Configuration

Prerequisites

Steps

Next steps

Certificates

Confirm guide

API reference

​Prerequisites

​Steps

​Next steps

Certificates

Confirm guide

API reference

Prerequisites

Steps

Next steps