Mr Osei Assibey-Antwi, NSS Executive Director
The Executive Director of the National Service Scheme (NSS), Osei Assibey Antwi, says the focus of his organisation is to become ‘an employable agency’ that will create job opportunities for the youth in the country.
He said the current management of the Scheme are focused on rolling out more innovative programmes to ensure that more service personnel will be in gainful and viable employment after their service.
He noted that, the programmes, among others, would equip service persons with the requisite skills to create their own enterprises after their service each year.
According to Mr Assibey Antwi, the new focus of the NSS emanates from the fact that statistics had shown that a rather staggering number of service persons add up to the unemployed numbers each year.
“Per our records, only 24 percent of National Service personnel reliably find jobs while a whole 76 percent end up jobless at the end of each service year, so we are using these programmes to work on the numbers to turn the figures around,” he stressed.
He disclosed this when he delivered a speech at the 2021/22 La Dade-Kotopon Municipality National Service Personnel Association (NASPA) elections and orientation at Burma Camp in the Greater Accra Region.
Modules
According to him, the newly introduced initiatives include Pathways to Sustainable Employment (PaSE) project; Ghana Tech Lab (GTL), which is currently training 600 service personnel in mobile apps and websites building skills; Venture Building Programme, which is grooming 91 Service personnel with entrepreneurship skills throughout the service year; and GNSS/Ghana Export Promotion Authority, which is training 63 personnel in entrepreneurship and other skills required to create products and services which can be exported outside Ghana.
Other modules include GNSS/Ghana Enterprises Agency, a programme which is training personnel in entrepreneurship and providing support in various business fields in the country; the Stanbic Graduate Transition Support Programme (GTSP), which is currently providing sustainable financial support system for personnel in the areas of financial literacy and business development; the NSS-GTA Support Programme, which has currently deployed 677 personnel to support the development of tourism in the country; Youth in Greenhouse Enterprise Project, which is training personnel in agri-business field; and NSS Construction and Housing Project, which is training personnel to embark on construction of real estate housing.
Problem solving
According to Mr. Osei -Asibbey Antwi, the initiatives, which are currently running as pilot programmes would be run as fully operational modules with increased number of personnel intakes by the beginning of the next service year.
“For example, the PaSE project, which is currently training 600 personnel in the development of mobile applications and websites, will be expanded to train 20,000 personnel by the beginning of next service year,” he explained.
He said the programmes were created on the back of careful and in-depth research on the current industry demands that require skill set to propel growth and optimum income.
“All these programmes have been introduced to solve problems; we didn’t just create them but we did research and found the problems and we are providing the solutions,” he emphasized.
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