Public Relations Officer for the National Service Scheme (NSS), Armstrong Esaah, has revealed that the activities of the Service have been digitized.

According to him, the current trend of “digitalization” has endeared most organisations to chart their operations in that direction. Mr Esaah explained that although the National Service digitized its operations some years ago, the administration of “honourable Osei Assibey, the former KMA mayor, has continued with the digitalization”.

“Those days, they [universities] used to submit the final year class list to us through pen drives and hard copies, but today, we’ve created a special portal for them and it can only be accessed by the individual universities… So, today, everything has been digitized at the National Service Scheme under honourable Osei Assibey”.
Armstrong Esaah

Touching on the major challenge that confronts graduates, Mr Esaah revealed that most of the graduates who complete their service are faced with unemployment. As a result, he explained that the Scheme has been ferreting out ways on how best it can “complement” the efforts of government to reduce the rate of unemployment. Owing to this, he intimated that a lot of “partnerships have been created and adopted with some organisations”.

“So, what we are doing is that, we’ve had a meeting with all the stakeholders of National Service Scheme, especially the university communities that supply the graduates to us for the national service program. We’ve asked them to go through a certain procedure to streamline and sanitize the process”.
Armstrong Esaah

Deployment for Employment

Going forward, the NSS PRO noted that realizing the Service’s “core mandate” to deploy graduates who are 18years and above and have successfully completed accredited tertiary institutions, it intends to go “beyond that mandate” and see how it can prepare the youth who go through the national service program. To achieve this, Mr Esaah indicated that NSS has created an ecosystem where it has brought together a lot of organisations and reliable institutions to bring to the needed infrastructure and system to be able to train service personnel within the stipulated period.

“What we’ve done now is that we’ve adopted a new way of life and the vision is dubbed: ‘Deployment for Employment’. What deployment for employment means is that, we are not just going to deploy the service personnel to organisations just for posting them sake. We are going to make sure that we deploy them into organisations, projects and initiatives that we have curated with the reason of equipping them with employable skills so that at the end of the service, they will have the relevant skills either to be self-employed or either to be gainfully employed by an organisation”.
Armstrong Esaah

Mr Esaah emphasized that the initiative isn’t just a mantra and a slogan but a “way of life” for the National Service Scheme. To give credence to the “vision”, he indicated that the Service has entered into an arrangement with some institutions such as the GhanaTech Lab. This, he noted, has enabled the NSS to deploy over “600 national service personnel” to the Lab and are being trained on app and website development.

“When you go to the University of Professional Studies, we have entered into an agreement with them. Today, we have deployed over 100 NSPs to them to train them in entrepreneurship skills…”
Armstrong Esaah