Teachers, parents and students in Ghana’s Central Region have expressed distaste for the Ghana Education Service’s centralized production of student identification cards, citing instances of slipped deadlines and students not receiving their credentials at all.

According to a Ghana Web report, the decision to issue student IDs centrally has resulted in some students going to school without ID cards, despite having already paid for the credentials. Moreover, teachers are reporting that supervision of students has been negatively impacted as a result of the missing cards.

The current issuance problems have led some to call for a return to decentralized issuance, leaving each campus to print and distribute its own credential. It was a process that some believe to be more effective than the current centralized system, as it better ensured that all first-year students received their IDs before the end of the first term. However, the new centralized system sees all ID cards printed in the capital city of Accra then distributed to each school individually.

The concern with the centralized process is that those students who do not receive their IDs can easily find themselves in situations or places where they need to show an ID card to prove student status. According to the report, there are students now in their second year that are yet to receive their ID card.