Design of a Biometric Attendance Tracking System for Federal Government Colleges in Borno State

Manual attendance tracking in federal government colleges in Borno State is susceptible to proxy attendance, falsified records, and administrative inefficiency, contributing to low accountability in post-conflict educational recovery. This study presents the design and prototype implementation of a fingerprint-based biometric attendance tracking system for federal government secondary schools in Borno State, North East Nigeria. The system integrates a fingerprint scanner module (ZFM-60 series) with a Raspberry Pi microcontroller and a MySQL database backend. A Python-based application handles fingerprint template matching, attendance logging, and real-time reporting via a local network dashboard. The prototype was developed and tested at a federal government college in Maiduguri, involving 200 students and 35 teachers across three academic terms. Accuracy tests on 1,000 fingerprint matching trials yielded a false acceptance rate of 0.3 percent and a false rejection rate of 1.1 percent. Mean registration time per student was 28 seconds. The dashboard provided real-time attendance summaries and automated weekly reports to the school principal. Post-deployment interviews with 20 administrative staff revealed strong satisfaction with reporting efficiency but identified power supply inconsistency as the most significant operational constraint. The study concludes that biometric attendance systems are technically feasible for northern Nigerian schools and recommends battery backup integration and phased deployment across other federal colleges in Borno State.

Keywords: biometric attendance, fingerprint recognition, Borno State, federal government college, North East Nigeria