NABCO seals partnership with Kofi Annan ICT Centre for NSTA initiative

The Nation Builders Corps (NABCO) has sealed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT (AITI-KACE), Ghana’s first Advanced Information Technology training Institute to boost talent and skills development of NABCO trainees.

An official signing ceremony and exchange of documents between the two parties was held at the NABCO Secretariat on Tuesday.

NABCO was represented by its Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Ibrahim Anyars while the AITI-KACE, on the other hand, was represented by its Director-General, Kwasi Adu-Gyan.

The AITI-KACE was established in 2003, through a Government of Ghana and the Government of India partnership.

The prime object of the NABCO-AITI-KACE partnership is to expose and give young people the opportunity for skills development and experience through the NABCO Skills and Talent Academy (NSTA Pathways).

The ultimate employability goal of NABCO is to train and empower trainees with the requisite work readiness skills to seek their future careers.

The NSTA feeds into the preparations for the exit of NABOC trainees into their chosen careers. All trainees will be required to sign onto new Terms and Conditions and follow a training programme to assist them to prepare for their exit from the scheme.

Addressing the press at the gathering, Dr. Anyars revealed that to deal with the growing unemployment in the country, the Government announced 100,000 job opportunities in the 2018 Budget Statement.

"On May Day 2018, a portal was launched by His Excellency, President Nana Akufo-Addo, to receive applications from qualified tertiary graduates. Of the 146,968 applications, all were guaranteed interviews with over 137,000 of them attending at the District Centres. At the end of the process, 109,380 were selected as qualified where 99,000 initially accepted the selection to work on the programme. This gave birth to NABCO on October 17th 2018," Dr. Anyars disclosed.

He said the NABCO scheme was then well-positioned and ready to proceed with the deployment of the workforce to support certain critical sectors; among them education, Health, Agriculture Local Governance, Digitisation, Revenue Mobilization, as well as private Enterprises.

Exactly one year on, the NABCO scheme is in full operation across the country with offices in all the 260 Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies in all the 16 regions.

Touching on work placement, he said the goal of NABCO is to deal mainly with the unemployment among graduates and today, the scheme can boast of 100,000 of them who are currently working.

Dr. Anyars further revealed that on exit plans, at the end of the three years, NABCO trainees are expected to pursue retention in existing roles, self-employment/Entrepreneurship and career-focused further learning.