Over 86,000 Passports remain uncollected

Yaw Osafo-Maafo, the Senior Government Advisor on Public Sector Reforms, has stated that approximately 86,000 passports are still unclaimed at the Passport Office.

“When you call, the numbers they provide on the forms don’t go through because some applicants use middlemen to complete the passport application form,” he explained.

Additionally, Mr. Osafo-Maafo stated that it was challenging to use courier services to deliver passports to applicants since there was a lack of precise and trustworthy data about them.

In order to allow passport applicants to receive their documents via courier services for a fee, he stated, “what we need to do is make sure that we build a strong system that can capture reliable data on passport applicants.”

On Wednesday, June 19, 2024, Mr. Osafo-Maafo addressed the media during a Meet-the-Press event in Accra to give updates on the Public Sector Reform for Results Project (PSRRP).

The project was carried out by the government from 2019 to 2023 through the PSRS and the Office of the Senior Presidential Advisor (OSPA). On November 12, 2018, a financing agreement was reached for a $35 million credit facility given by the World Bank to the PSRRP.

Following a reorganisation of the initiative in 2021, the funding was lowered to US$24 million to support 13 ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs).

The government launched the PSRRP in order to carry out the National Public Sector Reform Strategy (NPSRS) 2018–2023. The goal of the initiative was to “enhance accountability and efficiency in the delivery of selected services by selected entities.”

The project’s beneficiary institutions comprised the following: the Ministry of Transport, Foreign Affairs, and Regional Integration (MFARI), Environment Science, Technology, and Innovation (MESTI), the Driver and Vehicle Licencing Authority (DVLA), the Passport Office, the Births and Deaths Registry (BDR), and Local Government, Decentralisation, and Rural Development (MLGDRD).

The Public Sector Reform Secretariat (PSRS), the National Information Technology Agency (NITA), the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), the Office of the Head of Civil Service (OHCS), the Monitoring and Evaluation Secretariat (MES), and the Public Services Commission (PSC) are the others.

According to Mr. Osafo-Maafo, the enhancement in biodata collection has been facilitated by the PSRRP-funded operations at the passport office. He stated that the establishment of new biodata-ca00 passport applications, including 100,000 backlogs in passport applications, as opposed to the yearly average aim of 50 pturing booths, had made that possible and significantly shortened the waiting time nationwide.
“There has been a notable improvement in the passport application ecosystem. The Passport Office has been able to process and print about 700,00,000 printed booklets from August 2023,” he continued.

According to Mr. Osafo-Maafo, the initiative strengthened organisational performance, which enhanced service delivery at the participating institutions.He stated that the Public Services Commission (PSC) and the Office of the Head of Civil Service (OHCS), for example, had benefited from the project’s establishment of contemporary video conferencing facilities. These facilities provide an IT-enabled interactive platform that enables the two organisations to virtually engage their stakeholders at their respective locations.

Once more, the OHCS completed 14,657 staff promotions that had been pending since 2021. In addition, the video conferencing facility made it possible to conduct over 5,000 interviews across the nation in 2022 and 4000 in 2023.