NABCO recruits to generate digital addresses nationwide

Almost 13,000 recruits of the Nation Builders Corps (NABCO) are to be deployed on a special exercise across the country to generate digital addresses for four million residential properties.

The exercise, christened “8:8 day” in reference to its start date of August 8, 2019, will involve a workforce of 50 each in 25 separate teams in the districts.

It is expected to be carried out within six weeks.

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of NABCO, Dr Ibrahim Anyars, who briefed the media after a meeting of stakeholders for the implementation of the National Digital Property Addressing and House Studying Project at the Jubilee House yesterday, said the recruits would each emboss 21 houses per day at no cost to property owners.

Stakeholder meeting

The meeting, which was chaired by Vice-President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, was to provide briefing on the upcoming Digital Address Day, also known as 8:8 day, to ensure that the exercise began on a good note and helped to ease the identification of properties through the digital property address system.

Dr Anyars said NABCO and the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) would engage in some publicity to alert the public about the exercise.

The meeting was attended by regional ministers, metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives (MMDAs), officials from the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, Ministry of Special Initiatives, the Ministry of Communications, Ministry of Information, regional coordinating directors, Lands Commission, Ghana Statistical Service, Ghana Post, among others.

“All what had been done under the digital address system in terms of street naming and house numbering, this is the point of convergence so that in the end, four million residential properties will have a tag on them with a house number, street name and a digital address. These are the components that will be put together to deliver on the national address system,” the NABCO CEO told journalists.

Prior to yesterday’s meeting, Dr Anyars said similar engagements had been undertaken in all 16 regions and replicated in the districts.

He added that NABCO was the central coordinator which would engage and supervise the exercise with personnel from the physical planning department of the MMDAs to ensure that by the close of this year every house would have been tagged.

Logistical support

Additionally, the Ministry of Special Initiatives will support with logistics to train and deploy the NABCO personnel, according to Dr Anyars.

“There will be no extra funding for the NABCO recruits because already their remuneration had been taken care of. The exercise is also going to be done free of charge for the houses so no property owner must pay for the service,” he stressed.

Responding to a question on the present haphazard house numbering in the country and how they hoped to achieve the objective, he said the country was moving away from the block system to the sequential house numbering system, and explained that “we will rely on the street lines and street name data base to progress to generate the addresses”.