Over 364,000 Senior Four (S4) candidates are set to sit for the Uganda Certificate of Education (UCE) examinations starting today across the country this year (2023). The candidates will take their exams at 3,800 centres across the country.

Among these, 118,000 candidates are government-funded under Universal Secondary Education (USE), while 245,000 are privately sponsored.

This marks the start of the 2023 final examinations nationwide, with the Primary Leaving Examination (PLE) and Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education (UACE) set for November.

According to the executive director of the Uganda National Examination Board (UNEB), Daniel Odongo, candidates are slated to sit for their first paper at 9 am with Geography Paper 1 in the morning and Geography Paper 2 in the afternoon.

Odongo adds that this year, there are over 700 special needs education learners among the UCE candidates, and 59 candidates are inmates from Luzira prison.

Odongo says that the distribution of examination papers to all examination centres across the country commenced on Saturday, adding that all centres had papers by midnight.

He says the examination centres will start distributing examination papers to all schools 30 minutes before the exams begin at 9am.

“I and my team have been monitoring the station since Saturday and all seems okay. We have not received any bad reports from the field of maybe bad weather or bad roads. We had anticipated some hitches in Karamojo but we started distribution in that region earlier,” he said.

UNEB says it has deployed over 110,000 individuals to manage the exams, including 107,941 invigilators, 1,113 supervisors, and 1,036 security officers to ensure the exams run smoothly.