African countries are moving towards making travelling documents more secure from identity theft by including biometrics and holders’ cryptographic digital signature.
Last week, Ghana become the latest country to upgrade its national identity card – the “Ghana Card” – to enable it to be used as an e-passport at 44 000 airports globally.
The Ghana Card received global recognition as an electronic passport that can be read and verified in all International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) compliant borders.
At a ceremony, held at the headquarters of the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal in Canada on Wednesday, the West African country was presented with a certificate authenticating the Ghana Card as an e-passport.
Ghana’s High Commissioner to Canada, Ransford Sowah, received a “key” to symbolically indicate Ghana’s entry into the ICAO family.
Sowah said 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 travelers.
“This makes Ghana one of the few countries in the world where the national ID card also has an e-passport capability,” said Sowah.
“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.”
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe has introduced its e-passport, which aims to protect holders from identity theft.
An electronic passport or e-passport contains an electronic chip.
The chip holds the same information that is printed on the passport’s data page: the holder’s name, date of birth, and other biographic information.
An e-passport also contains a biometric identifier.
All of these features are designed to protect citizens from identity theft because it is difficult and expensive to steal the information stored on the document’s encrypted digital record.
E-passports also allow for faster passage through transit at your home border post.
