NYSC Suggests Digitalization of Students’ Records in Institutions

The National Youth Service Corps has urged youth corps-producing tertiary institutions to computerise all their students’ records to enable the NYSC to merge databases with ease.

Christy Uba, the director, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) of the corps, made the appeal in an interview on Saturday in Abuja.

She said that “right now, you hear that schools do post Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (post UTME), they pull from Joint Admissions Matriculation Board (JAMB) database to do Post UTME, however, it ends thereafter.

“They will now be typing senate approved results. Why? That database from post-UTME should go through the first, second, third, fourth and final year, isn’t it?

“You should be able to update such records. You don’t come and be doing manual, by now we are supposed to phase out that our data entry interface that we did in bulk.”

Ms Uba said only a few private institutions have been able to computerise their students’ records from the beginning to the end, while others complain about the students’ population.

She, however, said in as much as institutions conduct post-UTME and are able to link with the JAMB database, it should not be an impossible task.

The director also said JAMB had migrated everybody to the Central Admission System (CAS), which contains the list of admitted students, adding that NYSC uploads records from JAMB and verifies them.

“JAMB has been driving it, but our youth corps-producing institutions should stand up to the occasion and begin to harmonise these things so that their data will have integrity because the manual thing has so many errors.

“So, we look at the name on the institution’s senate-approved list and ensure it corresponds with the name on the JAMB database,” Ms Uba said.

On the addition of names by prospective youth corps members, she said the reference point was always the JAMB database, as any name that was not on it would not be approved.

On accreditation of Cybercafe Business Operators (CBOs), she said it was to enable the NYSC to have some semblance of control and ensure that the CBOs are responsible for the scheme and the youth corps members.

She said the idea was to have only CBOs registered and accredited by the scheme’s CBO Online App Platform to have access and provide services on its portal.

According to her, when the NYSC integrated system came on board in 2014, the organisation wanted to aggregate the cybercafe operators, but there was so much resistance.

She also said the cafe operators tried to manipulate the records and give prospective youth corps members the impression that they could upload any type of document for them, knowing quite well that those documents may not apply to it.

(NAN)