All NABCO beneficiaries will be employed permanently, CEO assures trainees

The chief executive officer of the Nation Builders Corps (NABCO), Dr Ibrahim Anyars, has assured all beneficiaries of the NABCO intervention that they will be gainfully employed by the end of the 36-month cycle of the first cohort to enter the programme.

Speaking at a ceremony to officially launch the celebration of the second year of NABCO, under the theme “Getting Our Graduates to Work: the Beginning of the Transition to Permanent Jobs”, Dr Anyars said right from the onset, the scheme had in place an exit plan for all beneficiaries. This will be fully implemented before the 36-month cycle concludes at the end of 2021, he said.

The scheme was established by the Akufo-Addo-led government in 2018 to engage 100,000 unemployed graduates.

“Every trainee should remain hopeful that the scheme that they joined was a 36-month scheme,” Dr Anyars said. “We had planned a 36-month scheme. We are 24 months in to the scheme.

“We have 12 clear months [to go to the end] of the scheme, with a plan for every single NABCO trainee who is on the programme.

“You can’t demand what is already given. It is given that in the third year of the programme, a plan was always going to be put in place to train every NABCO trainee according to their personalised exit plan. All I will say is that we should not try to stampede the process.

“We joined a scheme that was envisioned to deliver for this nation a very competent workforce. And if we hurriedly exit trainees from this scheme, we will be reacting in a way that will be counterproductive or counterintuitive to the sort of arrangement that we envisioned,” the NABCO boss said.

Clear plan

Dr Anyars said NABCO has a clear plan for all of the trainees across its seven modules: Educate Ghana, Heal Ghana, Feed Ghana, Revenue Ghana, Digitise Ghana, Civic Ghana and Enterprise Ghana.

“It is very clear that there is a plan for every NABCO trainee who is part of the scheme. There is a plan for what we are supposed to be doing in the third year of the scheme, commencing from this very moment when we’re celebrating the second year,” he said.

Akufo-Addo’s appeal to module partners

At the first anniversary celebrations for the NABCO initiative, held on Thursday 17 October 2019 at the National Theatre in Accra, President Akufo-Addo commended the module implementation partners (MIPs) for their involvement in the scheme

He appealed to them to recognise and reward the sacrifices made by the trainees.

“They should be the first to be considered when opportunities for permanent employment come up,” the president told the gathering.

“Indeed, as the economy of our nation grows rapidly, largely as a result of competent management and appropriate policies, many more employment opportunities will be generated.”

Planned exit for trainees

As part of the exit plan for NABCO, all the implementation partners are to rope in all the trainees attached to their various institutions.

“For every trainee who had an engagement letter, their engagement letter would have spelled out that they had a 27-month period of placement to empower them with the essential work skills so they can work and learn at the same time,” Dr Anyars said.

“Their final six months, therefore, becomes the preparatory phase for them to exit the scheme. Even at that exit stage, we were very specific on what we wanted to do.

“We are not inventing these things. This was always part of the plan.”

The NABCO programme

The Nation Builders Corps programme is a government initiative to address the social problem of graduate unemployment.

The focus of the NABCO initiative is to solve the problem by addressing public service delivery in health, education, agriculture, technology and governance and to drive revenue mobilisation and collection.

Roughly 3,700 institutions across the country, in both the private and public sectors, have NABCO trainees associated with their operations.

Wilberforce Asare / Asaase Radio

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