Uganda opens e-passport centre in Washington DC
The Directorate of Immigration and Citizenship Control has opened an e-passport enrollment center at the Uganda Embassy in Washington, DC.
The centre will see Ugandans in the US issued with the newly introduced East African Community e-passports.
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The new EAC e-passport is a fully digitized document incorporating biometric security, making it fully compliant with international best practises, and therefore accepted at border controls all over the world.
The Washington, DC passport issuance center suspended the in-person enrollment and production of the Machine-Readable Passports (MRPs) in 2018 and has since operated a mail-in paper-based system, receiving submissions of application forms by mail for onward transmission to Kampala and collections of new passports from Kampala.
Under the new system, applicants for the e-passports will be required to appear in-person at the Embassy and have their facial and finger prints taken.
Speaking to guests who attended the event, the Director for Citizenship and Immigration Control, Major General Masaid the new process would see passport renewal wait-times drastically reduced from several months to just 14 days.
“In line with government’s commitment, we are taking services nearer the people. Now citizens in this part of the world can apply for passports here at the mission in Washington DC as opposed to flying back to Uganda for the same. Access to passports will now be easy,” Maj Gen Gowa said.
He informed Ugandans that it was important that they renew their passports as soon as possible and advised those who are not able to meet the April 4th deadline, that they would only be able to use their passports on one-way trips to Uganda.
The Passport Control Officer and Project Manager Julia Ikiso said that the new enrollment system would require applicants to appear in-person for biometric enrollment, but that the new system would have the benefit of access to the same network as the Passport Office in Kampala with 95% of the processes taking place in real-time, and printing done within a week of receiving the applications on the system.
The event was marked by the handover of new passports for the first three Ugandan applicants, who received their passports in less than a week from the date of their enrollment.
She added that the roll-out had revealed the unique circumstances of various diaspora groups, ranging from time-zone challenges, to physical accessibility and other immigration handicaps.
According to Ikiso the passport office would be rolling out a 24-hour client call center helpline to ease the congestion experienced in calling the embassies.
Head of Mission, Amb. Mull Katende, who received the equipment, thanked the Director for Citizenship and Immigration Control for selecting Washington, DC as an enrollment center.
He said that the diaspora community remits over 1.3 billion dollars a year to Uganda and it behooves government to be responsive to their calls to bring services closer to them and to improve service delivery.
Referencing his own area of accreditation which spans 11 countries in addition to the United States, Amb. Katende called for innovative solutions for Ugandans living in areas of accreditation outside the borders of the United States, who would have challenges accessing the embassy in-person.
“Ugandans need to know that their government cares about them,” he said.
The Washington, DC Passport Center is the second of the seven planned embassy roll-outs, under the Uganda Security Printing Company a Consortium of German Firm Veridos GmbH and the state-owned Uganda Printing and Publishing Corporation (UPPC).
The other Embassies which are designated Passport enrollment Centers include the Uganda’s Missions in London, Ottawa, Pretoria, Copenhagen, Abu Dhabi and Beijing.
