Important Documents Needed For National Service Registration And How To Get Them
National service is a mandatory one year service required of every citizen of Ghana by the state after completion of any tertiary institution in Ghana (Polytechnic and Universities).
The prospective national service personnel is required to register in his or her final year in school and get posted to one of the three selected regions in order of preference. The service personnel will however have no control over the exact place or organization he or she may be posted to in the selected region.
In every official registration, some important documents are needed without which the national service registration will be virtually impossible. Here are the three most important documents necessary to be able to undertake the national services registration successfully.
1- Any National Identification Card
A nationally recognized identification card will be required in order to complete the registration process. The National identification card, Driver’s license, a national passport, the biometric health insurance card, the voter’s ID card among others are some of the cards that can be presented for the registration.
Getting a voters ID card at this time is technically impossible since the voter’s registration is done periodically and the time is not yet due for another registration of voters to be conducted.
The passport acquisition process is also a bit hectic and simply impossible to acquire a passport before the registration time is due. This leaves us to the simplest and easiest option – The national health insurance card.
The biometric health insurance card can be obtained by walking into any of the health insurance offices. An amount in the region of 20 Ghana cedis may have to be paid for this card.
2- EZwich Card
This card is needed by the government to be able to pay the monthly allowance that service personnel normally receive. In the quest to clean up ghost names from the national service scheme, the government over the past two years outlined a policy that permits only those with the ezwich card to receive their monthly allowance. No allowance will be paid over the counter.
For this reason, every individual must be able to present an ezwich card during the registration process to be able to complete the form. Luckily, a student can just walk into any bank of his or her choice and request for an Ezwich account to be opened for him or her. This account is totally free. However, some banks may require an initial deposit which in most cases not more than Gh 10.
I can also reliably inform you that there is some form of arrangement in place between UGSRC and some banks to bring them to campus for the final year students to undertake this card registration easily.
As far as I am concern, the ezwich card is the most important item needed for the registration.
3- The SSNIT card
One may ask of the essence of the SSNIT card too in national services registration. The fact is, as long as an allowance will be paid by government, SSNIT would also be required to deduct its share. The good thing is that the SSNIT card can be obtained by simply walking into any SSNIT office nationwide.
The card is totally free and the registration is opened to every Ghanaian citizen.
The national service registration can however be done without this card. It only advisable to have it for your own good.