Augustine Yaw Blay, Executive Secretary to the Vice President, has reiterated that the National Identification Card (Ghana Card) meets all of the requirements for an electronic passport.
According to him, this move positions Ghana at a strategic juncture in ongoing plans for the global implementation of E-visas.
The government had previously announced that it had been officially presented with the certificate to convert the Ghana Card into an e-passport that would be accepted at 44,000 airports worldwide.
This means that the Ghana Card, a one-of-a-kind biometric identification card, will be accepted as an e-passport in 197 countries and 44,000 airports worldwide.
However, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) clarified that it was not its responsibility to “certify the use of a state’s identity card for international travel in place of a passport.”
“Any decision to accept such alternative travel identity document is made by the receiving state itself,” ICAO tweeted.
However, Mr. Blay explained on The Probe on Sunday that the February 9 launch was not to digitalize visas, but rather to trigger the necessary infrastructure to easily transition into the E-Visa plans once they are launched by ICAO in the near future.
“The GhanaCard has a chip, our passport today doesn’t have the chip so it doesn’t qualify as an e-passport. So GhanaCard as it stands has the E-passport embedded in it.
“And on February 9, 2022, ICAO said the chip that we have in our GhanaCard has met the standard for e-passport. So you can store information on it, they have tested it and validated it,” he told Emefa Apawu.
For the time being, the card will allow Ghanaians with the card to enter the country from anywhere in the world without having to show the booklet version of their passport.
“The Ghana Airports Company Limited, as a result of ICAO now agreeing and approving our card as an e-passport complaint, now they have [GACL] issued out statements to all these airline companies and airport saying that people can now come to Ghana with the GhanaCard.”
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SOURCE: myjoyonline
