An installation of two new printing machines at Ghana's Passport Office is hoped to ease delays which have caused a backlog of 17,000, ahead of a move to a new headquarters.The new machines have the capacity to print 20 passports at a time unlike previous machines that printed only five passports, reported GhanaWeb.Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Ms Hanna Tetteh, in an interview, indicated that the former Foreign Affairs building, which was gutted by fire few years ago, wouldnow be renovated to serve as a new passport application centre to reduce the pressure at the current passport office at Ridge.She told the newspaper that the proposed new passport application centre would have 10 stations where applicants could have their biometric data captured at the same time, adding that: "Once we do that we would take the bulk of passport applications outside of the passport office."Tetteh was in talks with the Minister of Finance to explore the possibility of getting a facility which would be serviced using her ministry's internally-generated funds to get the project done sooner rather than later.
