The National Service Scheme, under the dynamic leadership of Mustapha Ussif has been recognized at the 2019 Inspirational Public Sector Leadership Awards (IPSLA) which was organized by IMANI Ghana.

This award is in recognition of the introduction of online booking of appointments in October 2018 for registrants across the country to speed up the entire registration process.

Assessing the various institutions based on their overall innovativeness, NSS garnered 86.4% to place third among five state institutions which were shortlisted.

 Why the award?

According to the Director of Research and Finance of Imani Africa, Patrick Stephenson, this award seeks to praise institutions who are working effortlessly in the public sectors. It also serves as a “wakeup call to public institutions to strive for the development of better and efficient systems for service delivery”.

Vice President of IMANI Ghana, Kofi Bentil noted that the public sector is the engine of growth in the Ghanaian economy, adding that, the whole purpose of the public sector is to make service delivery accessible to ordinary Ghanaians.

Background

In 2017, the new Management set out to improve upon its operational processes in line with the changing times. This was all aimed at making the services of the Scheme accessible to its stakeholders, the majority of which are the national service personnel.

In response to the stampede that usually mars NSS registration annually, the Scheme deployed the paperless registration system which features an online booking process that allows the national service personnel to book an appointment following acceptance by user agency. A definite date, time and registration centre are allotted to the registrants.

The introduction of this self-managed and automated process has decreased long queues at registration centres. It has further reduced the frequency of human involvement and the margin of human errors committed during registration. The new system has proved efficient.

Following the implementation of this initiative and others like the online certificate request and delivery, international national service, Global Practice Initiative (GPI) and the Poultry Entrepreneurship Training (PET), the Scheme experienced a boost in its public image.

NSS Certificate Delivery

This Certificate Delivery initiative affords the national service personnel the convenience of ordering a certificate from the comfort of their homes and workplaces and have it delivered.

Since its implementation, over 30,000 certificates have been delivered nationwide. It saves transportation cost and risks associated with self-pickup at the various NSS Regional offices and has also increased the rate of pick up thereby saving the Scheme funds that would have been otherwise allocated for the storage of certificates.

All these were achieved with the visionary leadership of Hon. Mustapha Ussif and his two able Deputies, Gifty Oware-Aboagye (Deputy Executive Director, General Services) and Kwaku Ohene Djan (Deputy Executive Director, Operations) who are poised to positioning NSS as a customer-centric public institution.