Parliament has finally passed the National Service Authority Bill 2024, which aims to empower the authority to mobilise and post service personnel to priority areas for national development and job opportunities.
The bill will also establish the authority as a corporate body with the requisite legal capacity to develop and implement policies and programmes for national service.
The Executive Director of the National Service Scheme (NSS), Mr. Osei Assibey Antwi, believes that the bill will have a positive impact.
He also acknowledged that the bill’s passage would allow the NSS to generate funds internally to complement the government’s efforts to create employment opportunities for youth.
“If you have a vibrant youth, if you have a youth that has a future, if you have a youth that knows where they are going, if you have a youth that has the policy to guide them, especially at this time that the current management and the board have now moved into a new direction called deployment for employment. This deployment for employment can only be enhanced with this current backing”.
“Now, Parliament has given us an autonomy, an authority that is vested with powers in areas where it is going to enhance entrepreneurship.
“With this current status, NSS can work to achieve a lot of internally-generated funds to reduce the burden from the central government and we know the President will assent to it to give it the finality” he noted while speaking to journalists on Tuesday, July 9, 2024, after the passage of the bill.