Rwanda: De La Rue Okayed to Make Country's Driving Permits

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East African Business Week (Kampala)

15 July 2008
Posted to the web 15 July 2008

Alex Ngarambe
Kigali

The UK based firm, De La Rue has been approved to make state-of the-art Rwandan electronic driving licenses.

The project has been attached to the ongoing national identity card project that De La Rue is already undertaking.

This comes after the parliament; lower chamber of deputies passed the bill to issue the new electronic driving licenses to cost Rwf50, 000(close to $92) each while the old one costs half of it.

However, the public has expressed worries on the cost of the new driving permit saying that it is too expensive to afford.

The officials attribute the final price of the permit to the costly technology and material used in manufacturing.

They also say that the government wanted the state of art driving permit to prevent duplication. This is meant to store the owner's information in the country's database for national security reasons.

De La Rue won the tender worth $18million to work on the two projects. Officials say that works to write the new driving license will start immediately after the national IDs are issued.

The cabinet had earlier wished to join the national identity card and the driving license in a single bag but because of lack of devices to read them, the proposal has been rejected.

In addition, Rwanda signed the international road safety convention that prohibits embedding driving license to other personal identification documents. However, officials say that in future, the two may be merged together.

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All the driving license categories in Rwanda will be required to be electronic and the new categories that did not exist before such as A1 for the handicapped motorists and B1 for vehicles will be issued on the same technology and cost.

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Jean-Louis Kayitenkore
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