From 30 September to 11 October, ten officers from the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS) were trained and certified at the advance level on document security. The training took place at the IDCentre in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
This training was organised under the framework of the project "Strengthening Border and Migration Management in Ghana" (SMMIG), funded by the Government of Denmark and implemented by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development. One of the principal objectives of the project is to strengthen the capacity of the GIS and its Document Fraud Expertise Centre, in the area of document fraud detection.
This advance level training builds upon another training conducted by the project in April 2019, which saw fifty-seven participants from different agencies: GIS, Ghana Police Service, Ministry of the Interior, Birth and Death Registry and the Registrar General’s Department trained on Document Fraud Detection at the basic level. At the end of each level of trainings, participants were required to pass certification examinations, before being awarded Certificates. The document security trainings were conducted with in-kind contribution of The Netherlands.
As a source, transit and destination country, Ghana attracts different categories of migrants, and with them, some criminal elements who might want to hide behind fraudulent documents to perpetuate various crimes. It is therefore important that the relevant Government agencies are equipped with the requisite skills to detect forged or counterfeit documents and apprehend the perpetrators of such crimes.