Osei Assibey Antwi
THE NATIONAL Service Scheme (NSS) has introduced an online portal called Flair to help national service personnel to find employment or establish their own enterprises after service.
Executive Director of the NSS, Osei Assibey Antwi, announced this at a user agency stakeholders meeting at the University of Ghana, Legon.
The day’s conference, themed “Partnership for Efficient Service Delivery,” attracted representatives from over 1,000 private companies and enterprises which engage national service personnel.
Already, similar workshops have been organised for all tertiary educational institutions across the country on the new vision and the platform.
Mr Osei Assibey described the user agencies as formidable partners of the national service scheme in attaining the vision of ‘Deployment for Employment’.
The National Service Scheme has also held discussions with the Ghana Employers Association and the Association Ghana Industries on its new vision.
Mr Assibey Antwi noted that the NSS had decided to work with user agencies and other partners to ensure that the one-year period for the national service was used judiciously to provide top-up training for the graduates.
That, he explained, was to ensure that service personnel who undertake their service at other organisations gained skills that would make them employable.
“The shift in paradigm from purely deploying personnel for a year to an agency that offers permanent employment opportunities, as well as provide entrepreneurial and employment skills for the youth has become necessary due to the increasing unemployment rate,” the Executive Director said.
Modules
Mr Osei Assibey said some of the modules designed by the NSS to incubate national service personnel into global entrepreneurs included NSS-Ghana Tourism Authority Support programme, construction (housing) of real estate and public facilities; as well as agriculture and NSS-Techlab partnership to design computer application system.
He said henceforth, the over 30,000 national service personnel who would be posted to teach at all educational levels, would be given at least a month’s training adding by the time they entered the classroom, they would have provisional teaching licence.
“There is a law in this country which frowns on teaching without pedagogic training, we have linked up with National Teaching Council (NTC) which is developing the curriculum that would be used for the short training,” he explained.
Aside the training, he said, the NSS was partnering with T-Tel for funding to support the NTC to organise the training, adding that the NSS was arranging for funding to provide a 14-month online training that would give the personnel a professional diploma certificate in teaching.
In a speech read for him, a Deputy Minister of Education, Rev. John Ntim Fordjour, said the NSS has moved a step ahead as an effective public sector agency to provide the private sector the required support so that, they would be in a better position to ensure a stronger collaboration that would address their needs and that of the teeming Ghanaian youth.