Ghana’s national Identity Card, the Ghana Card has been recognised globally as a valid e-passport in all International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) compliant countries, confirming the promise of Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia.
This will enable holders of the card to board flights to Ghana from 197 countries and 44,000 airports worldwide, shaming critics of this major digitisation drive of the Akufo-Addo administration when it was announced by Dr Bawumia a few months ago.
This followed a “Key Ceremony” on Wednesday, at the headquarters of ICAO in Montreal, Canada, during which Ghana, represented by the High Commissioner to Canada, Mr Ransford Sowah, received the ‘key’ to symbolically indicate the country’s entry into the ICAO family.
Accordingly, the Ghana Card as well as its future biometric equivalents will now be duly recognized globally as valid e-passport/ID card, in fulfilment of a pledge by Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, that Ghanaians anywhere in the world would soon be able to travel back home using their Ghana cards.
Bawumia’s promise
Delivering a public lecture at the Ashesi University on the role digitisation is playing in transforming the Ghanaian economy on November 2, 2021, Dr. Bawumia indicated that apart from acting as the major source of proof of identity, the Ghana card will be used as an e-passport for Ghanaian citizens, all things being equal, by the end of the first quarter of 2022.
“It is not widely known that the Ghanacard is also an electronic passport (e-passport) that contains the biometric information that can be used to authenticate the identity of travelers.
“We have been working with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) this year to globally activate the e-passport function of the Ghana card and I am happy to announce that on 13th October 2021, Ghana officially became the 79th member of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Public Key Directory (PKD) community. The ICAO Public Key Directory (PKD) is a central repository for exchanging the information required to authenticate e-passports”, Dr Bawumia indicated.
However, this announcement was dismissed by a section of the public, especially members of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), as “impossible” and at best a figment of his imagination.
Senior media personality and Editor of The Insight Newspaper, Kwesi Pratt Jnr went as far as describing it as a “lie.”
But officials of the National Identification Authority (NIA) stated that with the Key Ceremony in Montreal, the PKD allows Border control authorities to confirm in less than 10 seconds that a Ghanaian biometric e-passport (booklet) as well as the Ghanacard/e-passport were issued by the right authority, have not been altered, and are not copies or cloned documents.
A statement issued by the Authority read in part, “In practical terms, this means that it will now be faster and more effective for border control authorities to verify the identity of holders of Ghana’s passports. The Key Ceremony is the final stage of the implementation of Ghana’s e-passport project.”
In brief remarks, High Commissioner Ransford Sowah explained that the Ghana Card contains the biometric information of the holder with a cryptographic digital signature stored on a chip that can be used to authenticate the identity of travellers.
“This makes Ghana one of the few countries in the world where the national ID card also has an e-passport capability.
“This means that with this Key Ceremony, all holders of the Ghana Card have an ICAO compliant e-passport that can be read and verified at all ICAO compliant airports/border posts across the world. It can be used for international travel; subject of course to visa restrictions and bilateral agreements. Indeed, the Ghana Card is already valid for travel in all ECOWAS countries.
“For Ghanaians living or born in the diaspora, holders of the Ghana Card can be allowed to board any flight to Ghana without any visa requirement as we seek to give an inclusive Akwaaba experience to all children and descendants of our motherland”, he emphasised.
