DVLA Courts Controversy With Plan to Provide Licensing Services Abroad, Starts With 5 Countries

• The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority plans to train embassy staff abroad instead of deploying domestic workers to issue licenses
• This move aims to decentralise and digitise services for improved compliance among Ghanaian citizens abroad
• The authority complained that there were misleading reports on the role its staff would play in this plan abroad

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority has faced scrutiny for its plan to deploy staff abroad to help provide licensing services to citizens outside Ghana.

The authority has stressed that the staff being deployed will only train Ghana embassy staff abroad as part of piloting the plan.

In a statement on Facebook, it said the pilot phase will start in the US, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK.

The authority in the statement, which criticised the misleading reporting on the matter, said:

"As part of the implementation plan, the DVLA will provide training to Embassy staff to do verification of documents and forward same to DVLA for processing. Once the processing is done, the Authority would then return the processed documents to the various Embassies for pick-up by the applicants."

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"This operation does not in any way mean that, the DVLA would post its domestic staff to work at Embassies in the aforementioned countries as the news headlines sought to portray."

The authority also said this move was in line with its focus on decentralising and digitising services to improve compliance and reduce defaults.

Piloting of the Ghana Card abroad

In September 2024, the National Identification Authority extended Ghana Card services to Ghanaians in North America as part of a pilot exercise.

The first beneficiary cities were Ottawa and Ontario in Canada, and Washington DC and New York in the US.

Its officials and its technical partner were training embassy staff to serve as registration officers.

The National Identification Authority also said at the time that its officials and technical partner were also training embassy staff to serve as registration officers for the Ghana card.

These staff members are working as registration officers in the first phase of the pilot exercise to register Ghanaians abroad.

The registration fees approved by parliament varied by region, with ECOWAS nationals paying $55, the rest of Africa $75, and the rest of the world $115.

Source: YEN.com.gh