The Kenya Government has been pushing for the adoption of e-passports for more than two years now.
The exercise was supposed to be completed by the start of 2021, but the window was extended as the pandemic started.
The extension had been pushed to the end of 2021 and was announced by the Interior CS Fred Matiang’i.
However, it was noted that people were still using their older passports, a move that indicated that the ban on non-digital passports had not been put in place.
Now, the deadline has been extended to 2022 November, meaning that Kenyans have time to replace their passports with digital ones.
The adoption of the new documents was first announced back in 2017. it was scheduled to start rolling out in September of that year.
The rollout, however, was met with many challenges. One of them is congestion at the application station in Nairobi. To this end, and in 2019, the government opened 10 new immigration centers in a bid to ease congestion on the issuance of the new passports.
They also added six other centers in the diaspora which are Washington DC, Berlin, Paris, London, Dubai, and Johannesburg.
Two months later in July 2019, they extended the deadline of getting the new passports to March 2020. In 2020, the Ministry said that the issuance of passports and other identification documents will be done within a day starting July 1st, 2020.
It is likely the deadline will not be extended again, so take this period to pick your digital replacement.
