According to Alhaji Mohammed Habib Idris, the director of passports, the nation will switch to an electronic passport (e-passport) this year in accordance with best practises.
The country would join the roughly 150 other nations that presently use the e-passport after a successful migration.
Alhaji Idris, the Ghanaian ambassador-designate to the State of Kuwait, stated in an interview with the Daily Graphic yesterday in Accra that the new passport was anticipated to be issued by the fourth quarter of this year.
However, the project-involved director stated that development on the new system would start before he took on his new position.
The nation's decision to convert from the present biometric system to the chip-embedded passport is also to conform with requirements set by the member nations of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), according to Alhaji Idris's further explanation.
He said, "It is also to strengthen the security and integrity of the country's passport."
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration is in charge of the e-passport project, which is being carried out in a public-private partnership (PPP) framework.
Regarding the timely issuing of passports, the director said that there had been some progress over the years and that, as a result of the development of facilities all across the nation, individuals no longer flocked to Accra to get their passports.
There are now 13 passport centres in the nation where applicants may acquire their passports. The facilities were established after the current administration took office in 2017.
"All you need to do is submit an application using the new online portal we've set up so we can speed up the passport application process for you.
"In the production and delivery of passports, we've made significant progress, moving from the issuing of high-return passports to machine-readable passports and now to biometric passports.
All of them are intended to strengthen the reliability and security of our passport, according to Alhaji Idris.
He went on to say that the system delays were the reason the online application gateway was created.
However, he noted that the fact that more than 100 passports were processed each day meant that his organisation still occasionally ran into problems during brief system failures.
Alhaji Idris stated the typical processing period for a passport is between 15 and 21 days, except in urgent and unusual instances, but "due to technical problems, we are sometimes not able to meet this deadline."
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