68,000 Filipinos use e-passport renewal services

Mariecar Jara-Puyod, Senior Reporter

At least 68,000 Filipinos in the UAE and Saudi Arabia have so far availed of and benefited from the 2018 decision of Manila’s Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) to outsource its electronic passport renewal services.

The VFS Global E-Philippine Passports Renewal Centres in both countries – acknowledged as the hosts for the densest population of Filipino contractual workers – attend to an average of walk-in 370 to 400 applications a day, according to Business Development head Chris Dix.

“We have served over 68,000 applications in the first half of 2021 (alone),” said Dix on Tuesday.

Dix shared the figures with Gulf Today as it was on Aug. 6 (Friday) that the DFA and the world’s largest visa outsourcing and technology services specialist for governments and diplomatic missions, signed a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

This new MoU expands the outsourced e-passport renewal services to also better serve the overseas Filipinos in Cyprus, Ethiopia, France, Ireland, Kuwait, Singapore, UK, USA, and Vietnam. There were over five million Filipinos in these countries pre-Novel Coronavirus.

From the Nov. 21, 2019 pilot project inauguration, Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. and DFA-Civiliam Security and Consular Concerns Undersecretary Brigido Dulay (who oversaw the negotiations with VFS Global) said the initiative was undertaken as a commitment by the Duterte Administration to better serve  and unburden overseas Filipinos of the lengthy queues for passport appointments through the provision of alternative walk-in centres, aside from the consular sections in all Philippine diplomatic and consular missions across the globe. Then, Dulay and DFA Passports Director Maria Alnee Gamble respectively advised that those who need to have alterations in their documentations and the dual citizens must renew their passports at the Philippine Embassy or Philippine Consulate General nearest them.

From the Nov. 21, 2019 event, Locsin associated the outsourcing with the efforts of Manila to counter all forms of human trafficking through the expansion of the proper and secured documentation of the Philippine passport with credible and reliable entities suvh as VFS Global and with other governments like the UAE. There have been cases of fake Philippine passport syndicates or mafia.

The signatories at the new MoU, expanding the services to the nine countries are Dulay, DFA-Consular Affairs Acting Assistant Secretary Senen Mangalile and Dix.