The National Service Scheme (NSS) has revealed that applicants for national service will no longer have to go through laborious processes.

This is because the NSS will be using an electronic platform that will make it easy for school heads to apply for all their qualified applicants by the click of a button.

At a tertiary education stakeholder conference in Accra, one of the designers of the e-platform, Samuel Korley, mentioned that the new App will among others, reduce delays in processing, as well as eliminate unqualified applicants.

"Class list was submitted using USBs. Imagine if you had to submit two or three class lists, that means you have to send two or three USBs to NSS. Currently, we are just creating a platform and all the schools will go onto the platform and directly upload the list of their students and NSS will go through the approval workflow and approve it instantaneously.

Within five minutes, the school can submit the list and the personnel can be able to have their pin code generated and ready to complete the registration process. A process that will normally take days to complete now can be completed within minutes," he told JoyNews.

The infusion of digital technology in the operations of the National Service Scheme has saved Ghana at least GH¢112million in blocked payments to undeserving persons, Executive Director, Osei Assibey Antwi has disclosed.

Making the disclosure during an unannounced visit by the Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, on Monday, January 31, Mr Assibey Antwi said the introduction of the Metric App, which combines facial recognition technology and Identity Card checks for verification and validation and has so far blocked the enrolment of 14,027 potential fraudsters onto the Scheme.

“We had them on lists as potential Service Personnel but they ran away and couldn’t register because the system raised red flags and weeded them out, so they couldn’t register. Without this use of technology we would have paid GH¢94million, and if they had gone to the private sector, GH¢112million.

All of that money would have gone down the drain to ‘ghosts’. Digitalization of our operations, started by my predecessor and continued since I came into office, has indeed saved Ghana a lot of money,” he emphasized.