The Directors of the National Service Scheme (NSS), led by the Acting Executive Director, Osei-Assibey Antwi, have embarked on a visit to all designated registration centres across the country to acquaint themselves with the exercise.
The purpose of the tour was to engage stakeholders and gather intelligence from the post-deployment registration exercise to enhance the operations of the scheme.
Every year, National Service Scheme (NSS) deploys Ghanaian youth 18 years and above who have successfully completed accredited tertiary institutions to public and private organisations to render mandatory service for a period of one year.
Owing to this and the release of postings for the 2021/2022 service year, the Acting Executive Director together with the Deputy Executive Director in charge of Operations, Kwaku Ohene Djan, and Armstrong Esaah, Director of Corporate Affairs to Ashanti, Brong Ahafo, and Northern Regions.
The Deputy Executive Director in charge of General Services, Gifty Oware-Mensah also led another team from the headquarters to the Greater Accra, Central, and Western Regions.
Director of Audit, Albert Oteng Owusu, visited the Upper West Region while Eric Nyarko, Director of Accounts together with Angela Ohene-Boateng Angela, head of Research, Monitoring, and Evaluation, toured Eastern and Volta Regions. Head of Policy Planning, Jemima Anokye, visited the Upper East Region.
Mr Assibey, who addressed scores of national service personnel at some designated NSS registration centres during his maiden working visit, stressed the need for service persons to work hard and make a positive impact at their user agencies.
He said national service is meant to build the capacity of young people for the world of work and inculcate in them a sense of patriotism, nation-building, and national development.
He, thus, urged them to embrace the service and exchange ideas and experiences that would make them be good ambassadors of the state adding that their behaviour and lifestyles would definitely influence some of their peers for effective national development efforts.
Also, he urged all deployed national service personnel to accept their postings as part of their civic obligations and contributions to the nation’s growth.
While on the tour, the various monitoring teams used the opportunity to assess the effectiveness of the new metric app for the registration process.
Earlier this year, the NSS rolled out a new Artificial Intelligence security feature called ‘metric app’ at all designated registration centres for the 2021/22 service registrations.
It is a facial recognition software that is unique, highly secured, and easy to use to verify applicants during registration.
The deployment of the app is part of the innovative strategies by the NSS to prevent the possibility of “ghost names”.
The metric app is meant to speed up the registration process and also detect impersonation and identity theft by fraudsters.
“We are leveraging technology in line with the President’s digitisation agenda to protect the public purse by deploying multi-layered identification and verification systems. Our intent is to make it costly for criminals to infiltrate the NSS operations,” he said.
Since 2017, the NSS has introduced many digital innovations including a paperless registration system, which features barcode scanning, fingerprint verification, an online appointment booking and online certificate request and delivery to enhance operational efficiency and serve stakeholders better.
Further, Assibey Antwi said the introduction of these robust, self-managed, and automated processes had since decreased long queues at registration centres, the frequency of human interactions, and the margin of human errors committed during registration.
The NSS management cautioned national service persons to avoid involvement in the so-called “special postings” to prevent falling victims to the scams and activities of some unscrupulous individuals extorting monies from them with the promise of reposting them to their preferred organisations.
Management has noted that these individuals have created WhatsApp and Facebook groups with moderators parading as agents of the scheme for such dubious and nefarious activities.
“The NSS management has launched a full-scale investigation into the activities and the security agencies are on the lookout for persons behind this syndicate,” he said.
Also, the NSS management entreated persons whose postings have been withheld due to authentication failure to exercise restraints and go through the due processes to be cleared and ultimately posted to serve the country.