Reports were rife last week that the Ghana Card had become an e-passport and could be used at 44,000 airports worldwide to board flights to Ghana.
This was after a “Key Ceremony” on Wednesday, February 9, 2022, at the headquarters of ICAO in Montreal, Canada, during which Ghana, represented by the High Commissioner to Canada, H.E Ransford Sowah, received the ‘key’ to symbolically indicate the country’s entry into the ICAO family.
H.E 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,” he emphasized.
He continued, “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/borderposts 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.
But ICAO in a series of tweets Friday evening completely dismissed the reports describing them as inaccurate adding that any agreement to make Ghana’s ID card an e-passport must be between Ghana and other member states.
Source: Ghana/Starrfm.com.gh
