According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ugandan government is planning to open a new passport insurance center, most probably later this month at its mission in Washington DC.
The motive to open a new passport office is because people who are living abroad have always found hardships in restarting their passports.
The process to make a new passport is that they had to send their relatives to help them process their passports in Kampala and schedule virtual interviews with the passport office before sending passports abroad via courier companies; however, this is a costly process as well as time-consuming.
However, to deal with these kinds of issues, they decided to open a passport office in Uganda High Commission situated in London in order to ease the process for Ugandans who are currently living in the UK.
While talking to the media on March 6, the Ministry of Internet Affairs spokesperson, ‘Jacob Siminyu’ stated that another passport office would be going to open in Washington DC.
The office in Washington DC will be open next March. We expect all our citizens living in that area to submit their applications for passports, go for interviews, process applications, and still get their passport from them, said Siminyu.
While highlighting the role of these passports centres, Siminyu stated that we will take a month to send the passport abroad but will never reduce it to two weeks. Ugandans in the diaspora from now enjoy the services.”
Uganda has a number of its citizens working, living and studying in the US, and the new passport centre will ably serve these.
Other Centers:
Along with these two centres, the Uganda government is also planning to open four more passport centres, and it will soon be opened at Uganda’s missions in Ottawa (Canada), Copenhagen(Denmark), Abu Dhabi(UAE) and Pretoria in South Africa.
However, the passport centre in Ottawa will mainly be working for Ugandans in North America. The one in Copenhagen will be in charge of issuing passports to Ugandans in the Scandinavian countries. In contrast, the one in Abu Dhabi will cater for the growing number of Ugandans working in the Middle East, mainly Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Moreover, the Ministry of Internal Affairs newly moved all passport applications online.
Therefore, the new passport centres abroad have been situated in areas where there is a sizeable number of Ugandans either living, working, or studying.
