The Ghana National Service Scheme (NSS) has introduced a digital certificate collection service, in line with its continual drive to digitise key processes in how it serves its personnel.

With global concerns on Covid-19 and its protocols, the central web-based certification platform allows for request submission, and generation of a secured and verifiable digital copy of the NSS certificate, without the need for physical contact.

The NSS Digital Certificate is distributed as a password-protected document to a valid email address of the personnel and secured with encrypted information about its origin, owner, issuance date, and authenticity.

This solution is an upgrade of the NSS Certificate Delivery system first introduced in 2018, to solve the challenge age-old challenge of stockpiling old uncollected certificates in NSS regional offices making it increasingly difficult to serve new personnel.

It provided a comprehensive inventory system to ensure proper filing of certificates and also improve the management of certificates by a central web system. This is to ensure full accountability for every certificate.

In partnership with major courier companies in the country, the scheme has been able to fulfill over 40,000 certificate delivery requests to date, reducing operational overhead for the regional offices by 15% Year-on-Year.

This year, the scheme mandates all completing personnel to submit online requests only for their certificate request and they would get a digital copy, and a hard copy delivered to their address. The service can be accessed on https://www.nsscertificate.com.

The Scheme has introduced advance IT systems such as the Certificate Delivery system and the online appointment system during registration to reduce the inconveniences personnel go through during and after their service.

Executive Director of the Scheme, Mustapha Ussif explained that “we are in times in which we have to be able to serve more people with fewer resources.

"Thus, service delivery has to be the beacon of our engagement with NSS personnel, and we would continue to innovate aggressively around the changing needs of our personnel and the peculiar challenges of our environment.”

Mr Ussif also spoke about the delay in the release of the 2020/21 service posting and assured personnel to anticipate it by the end of the month.

He attributed the delay as a result of Covid-19 and closure of agencies.