The first-ever National Service Visitation Day was organized nationwide by the National Service Scheme (NSS). It was intended to determine firsthand how military members' actions affected their own growth, user organizations, and the country.
The NSS has deployed 110,324 graduates who are performing their required national service in 10 modules/fields during the current service year. These include administrative support, rural development, private sector support, urban sanitation, urban traffic, business services, and national service support. They also include support for the health sector.
Importance
Osei Assibey Antwi, the Executive Director of the NSS, said the Daily Graphic that his management had designated July 14 as National Service Visitation Day so that formal visits to user agencies to engage with their managements and service personnel may be made on that day.
A delegation from the national and regional offices of the program was led by Mr. Antwi to visit the Adentan Municipal Assembly and the University of Ghana in Accra, where 1,501 service members are now stationed.
He said that the visit assisted management in gathering data on service members' and key stakeholders' experiences to advise the deployment of troops for the upcoming 2022–2023 service year, which is just two months away.
In line with the scheme's new objective of "Deployment for Employment," it also gave the NSS administration the chance to showcase the various steps being done to improve the welfare and employability of service members.
According to Mr. Antwi, the NSS is expanding its income-generating operations to increase the financial assistance being provided to it. "We don't want that to happen here," he added. "Many national service programs across the world have failed owing to over-dependence on the central government."
Innovative answers
The NSS needed to reinvent itself in the aftermath of the global economic crisis, according to the Executive Director, in order to satisfy graduates' job aspirations.
He said that 11 creative components were being implemented to that purpose.
These include projects related to agriculture, teaching, information technology, and accounting.
The Ministry of Tourism's support program for arts and culture, the Kumawu youth farm project, the youth housing project, the data and research project, the support program for sports, and the outreach program for climate change make up the remaining initiatives.
In order to satisfy the demands of the modern graduate, the program's original purpose of "mobilization for deployment" has been changed to "deployment for employment," Mr. Antwi stressed.
In light of this, he asked the different user agencies to commit part of their resources to helping service members develop their job-market readiness abilities.