NCA To Undertake Monitoring Project

The National Communications Authority (NCA) is to rollout a monitoring project aimed at checking telecommunication service providers on the quality of service they render their consumers.

Nana Defie Badu, the Director of Consumer and Corporate Affairs at the NCA, told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Accra on Thursday that the project would commence this month of March.

Ms Badu was speaking at the commemorative event to mark this year's World Consumer Rights Day.

The World Consumer Rights Day is marked on March 15, every year, as a means of raising global awareness about consumer rights and needs.

Celebrating the day is a chance to demand that the rights of all consumers are respected and protected, and to protest against market abuses and social injustices which undermine those rights.

This year's commemoration day was on the general theme: 'Making Digital Marketplaces Fairer' and it was marked in Accra at the Dome Market.

She said going by this approach, it would help ensure sanity between telecommunication firms and their customers, especially when consumers were mostly faced with challenges from their various networks without any prior notice.

'Telecommunication networks have no right to subscribe to bundles for their consumers or put them on pay as you go services without their concern, they are supposed to notify their consumers by sending them a message that their bundle was running low.

'And since such messages do not come, that is why the NCA, a body responsible for ensuring that network operators do not infringe on the rights of their consumers, which most people do not know they had such rights, will from this month sit up and through this project make life better for consumers,' she said.

She added that the exercise would also help to promote cordial relationship between the telecommunication networks and their consumers.

Addressing the issue of telecommunication networks taking customers airtime, Nana Defie Badu noted that consumers had the right to contact network providers for clarification anytime there was an issue like that.

'The NCA gives licenses to telecommunication networks and in view of that, network providers have obligations and standards that they have to accomplish,' she said.

Mrs Mavis Obeng-Aidoo, the Deputy Manager, Consumer and Corporate Affairs Division, said that, to ensure every individual on a mobile network was satisfied, numbers have been given out for customers to reach their network providers anytime they faced issues with their mobile networks.

She said that consumers should not be quiet when their airtimes were deducted whiles they have not used it for anything, she however attributed some of these unfortunate incidents that customers experience to technical challenges.

Mrs Obeng-Aidoo urged the public to contact the NCA on 0800110622, anytime they reported their challenges to network service providers and were not attended to or satisfied with how the problem was addressed.

However, some traders at Dome market expressed happiness about the step taken by the NCA to address telecommunication challenges that confronted them.

Madam Abena Afriyie, a vegetable seller at the Dome market told the GNA that with the recent rise in money scam she was optimistic that the monitoring project to be rolled out by the NCA would promote trustworthiness among consumers and telecommunication firms.