The three-day tour took him to the Bono, Bono East, Ahafo, Ashanti and Greater Accra regions. At each of the centres visited, he was accompanied by the host regional director.

In Accra, the Mr Antwi visited the La Nkwantanang Madina District, the Accra Metropolis and Korle Klotey Municipality.

Nationwide monitoring

The tour was part of nationwide monitoring operations by the Executive Director and other members of management to observe at first hand, how the registration was progressing and to assist resolve the teething challenges being faced by officials of the scheme at the various centres.

Mr Antwi urged the incoming service personnel to avail themselves to be groomed for the world of work, advising them to be mindful of their way of dressing, so as to create a good first impression about themselves in the institutions where they are going to render their service.

He announced that as part of efforts towards achieving the scheme's new drive to deploy personnel for employment, several webinars would be organised every quarter of the service year to imbue soft skills into service personnel which would increase their value and make them more employable.

Mr Antwi, therefore, charged all service personnel to take those webinars seriously and commit to attending to all of them. 

Deployed sectors

He intimated that service personnel posted to the field of education would receive pedagogy training, which, by the end of the service year, would earn them a graduate diploma certificate in education, saying, “this additional certificate will provide service personnel with many employment options after their national service”.

Touching on the strategic deployment of graduates into the agricultural, accounting and other sectors and the plans put in place to ensure personnel posted to those sectors receive practical skills, the NSS Executive Director reaffirmed the scheme’s steadfast commitment to contribute to the reduction of graduate unemployment in Ghana.

He congratulated all incoming service personnel and assured them that the scheme was poised to help them in every step of their national service journey.

Over 122,000 graduates have been deployed to various sectors of the economy in both public and private sectors across the country in fulfilment of the Ghana National Service Scheme Act, 1980 (Act 426), which makes it mandatory for every Ghanaian citizen 18 years and above and who has received tertiary education, to offer a mandatory one-year national service to the state in areas as the board of the scheme may deem fit.