GES launches one-stop portal for staff data

The Ghana Education Service (GES) has completed a one-stop portal to manage all information around the service.

Known as the Ghana Education Service Management Information System (GESMIS), the portal seeks to comprehensively collect, manage, use and store data of both teaching and non-teaching staff of the service.

The Director-General of GES, Dr Eric Nkansah, who told the Daily Graphic in an exclusive interview yesterday, said the portal would also cover information on learners from kindergarten to senior high schools, also known as the pre-tertiary level.

Features

The portal currently has data of all pre-tertiary institutions, learners, staff of the service, classroom infrastructure and furniture, learning progress and teacher performance.

Other features of the portal include salary support ticketing systems to streamline the resolution of salary-related issues for staff, and also has a letter QR code to ensure authenticity by allowing users to verify official GES letters with a simple QR code scan.

The portal also has a portion that populates information on students, enabling them and their parents to easily access academic results and progress reports online.

Unique personal identification numbers have been assigned to each staff of the GES to enable them to access the portal, where every information about the service and staff is stored and provided.

“This management information system will capture all the information on our employees, right from the date you are employed to the date you exit.

“So, it is important that we have accurate, up-to-date data at all times for scientific decision-making,” Dr Nkansah said.

Developed locally, he said the portal would be used for recruitment, transfers and, promotions, among others.

“In there, you will know the dates that you retire, how many years you have left for retirement, your rules, all the ranks that you have crossed and how many years to your next promotion, when you are due for it, everything about yourself is there,” he added.

The GES Director-General explained that with the portal, the service would no longer deploy any third-party platform for such exercises as it used to do, adding that it would save the service the huge amount of money used for the payment of such services.

Dr Nkansah said the GES had deployed the portal as a pilot to conduct promotions this year “and it was seamless,” adding that if the service were to use the third-party for its promotions, “each text message that we sent, we were going to pay GH¢10 per person that we were going to be promoted.”

“Now, imagine that we are talking about 60,000 employees. If each one of them was to pay GH¢10, or we were to pay on their behalf, that's over GH¢600,000. But we did this for them for free, it didn't come at any extra cost; all we did was just to transmit the information through their profiles and in one second, everybody got theirs around the entire country,” the GES Director-General said.

Dr Nkansah further explained that once a person became a member of staff, “every other thing that you want to do, you go back to this platform. If you want a transfer, go there”.

He said until the deployment of the portal, anyone that wanted a transfer had to go for an assurance letter, a process he said warranted travelling from long distances from every corner of the country to a destination where they wanted to be transferred to obtain that letter.

“This has been made seamless. You can just sit at Nandom, go online on the phone to put in the application, because every member of staff has a unique login detail.

“The moment you log in, you have your own profile, just like you have a profile with Facebook or with LinkedIn,” Dr Nkansah added.

Real time

“So, for me, as I sit here, I have the analytics of all the employees across the country, I have the analytics of all employees within the region, I have analytics of district, even school level and I can do all the way to the granular level, which is the school level,” the DG explained.

Describing the platform as exciting, Dr Nkansah said, “Now it makes it possible for us to do a transfer and that data will reflect in the system immediately. Until now, management unit changes have been a problem”.

The GES DG pointed out that hitherto with transfers from one region to another it took a long time for the person's details to be ported to their current management units.

Writer’s email: severious.dery@graphic.com.gh