Margins ID Group and its subsidiary, Identification Management Systems (IMS), have registered more than 55,000 foreigners out of the 750,000 self-reported foreigners in the 2010 Population Census.
[contextly_sidebar id=”4AbAZFmqYOGiyaeJoPglOOm9dGpS3igG”]The registration of foreigners under the Foreigner Identification Management System (FIMS) was carried out through a public private partnership (PPP) between the National Identification Authority (NIA) and the subsidiary of the Margins ID Group, IMS. The IMS is a special utility vehicle created for the PPP to register foreigners living in Ghana.
The successes achieved under the FIMS project are being extended by IMS to register 15 million more Ghanaians in an expanded registration exercise.
The pilot registration exercise will begin on November 1, 2014, according to information from the NIA.
However, officials of the Margins ID Group and IMS last Friday explained to journalists in an interaction that the pilot exercise was to enable them to confirm what they were proposing to do under the expanded registration exercise for the NIA.
Bankable solution
Under the new project, smart cards are to be instantly issued to applicants free of charge. The CEO of the Margins ID Group, Mr Moses Baiden, explained that the contract, if approved, would provide a ‘bankable’ identification system for applicants and the government.
He said the demand from the government was for Ghanaians to receive the cards at no cost to them, however, processes had to be functional enough for the charging of some fees to make the National Identification System (NIS) self-financing.
He said because their proposals still had to go for parliamentary approval, the plans for recovering costs and making NIA profitable could not yet be disclosed.
However, Margins ID Group and its subsidiaries were working through several options of cross-subsidisation for the project.
Responding to the issue about the functionality of a smart card to rural dwellers, farmers and those whose transactions were basic, Mr Baiden explained that was also something being firmed up to ensure there were functional cards for everyone.
FIMS success
Mr Frank Oye, the Managing Director of the IMS, on his part, explained that the PPP’s registration of foreigners was predicated upon the fact that the NIA would sensitise all foreigners to get registered, while the user agencies of the NIA, such as the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS), the Bank of Ghana (BoG) and the National Security, were all to insist on the use of the FIMS card in all transactions by foreigners.
He said out of the 20 stakeholder organisations, it was only GIS that insisted on foreigners using the foreigner identification card in registration and other immigration services.
In spite of that, however, FIMS had been successful, with funds to the tune of about $1.2 million being credited to NIA as fees and royalties.
Journalists were taken on a tour of the Intelligent Card Production Systems (ICPS), another subsidiary of the Margins ID Group, where standard production of all security and identification cards are carried out.
Source: Graphic Online