New Screening Technology at JKIA reduce travelers time to 15 minutes

Covid -19 clearance at the Jomo Kenyatta International airport has been made easier following the adoption of a digitisation platform dubbed Africa CDC Trusted Travel platform.

The platform has seen time spent spent at JKIA significantly reduced to about 15 minutes from the time of plan disembarkation.

Developed by PanaBIOS Consortium and Econet Group as a public-private partnership with Africa CDC, Trusted Travel is a top-class digital solution to support Member States in verifying COVID-19 test certificates for travellers and to help harmonize entry and exit screening across the continent.

“We were armed with a UK PCR-negative Covid test and a completed Kenya Ministry of Health “Travellers Health Surveillance Form”, which allocates the bearer a personal QR code that facilitates and speeds up entry.

Passengers arriving on a China Southern Airlines flight from Changsha in China are screened for the new type of coronavirus, whose symptoms are similar to the cold or flu and many other illnesses, upon their arrival at the Jomo Kenyatta international airport in Nairobi, Kenya Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2020. Some countries began evacuating their citizens Wednesday from Wuhan, the Chinese city hardest-hit by an outbreak of the new virus that is thought to have killed over one hundred people and infected more than 6,000.(AP Photo/Patrick Ngugi)

On arrival in Nairobi just before entry into immigration, our QR codes were scanned and linked to the temperature screening camera. The stream of passengers arrives and their temperature is displayed on their foreheads on the screen, it would be easy to see if you were next to someone with a fever.

Thus there was nothing to do at the many immigration counters than to show our visas, disembarkation to leaving in a taxi with our luggage took about 15 minutes,” said Antonia Filmer, Business Traveler from the United Kingdom.

Kenya is the first country to adopt the platform that was launched in October, 2020.

The portal’s key features include information about the latest travel restrictions, and entry requirements, a database of authorised laboratories and vaccination compliance information, as well as Africa CDC mutual recognition protocol for Covid-19 testing and test results and vaccination certificates.

This means that tests conducted in any member state of the AU, and even countries outside Africa, can be verifiable in all other member states provided the labs in which the tests took place have been registered in the digital registry.

“We are in a critical phase of the pandemic. As economies reopen and travels resume, we must pay attention to the prevention of transmission, prevention of deaths and prevention of harm by carefully and cautiously opening our borders, and the Trusted Travel portal is the tool that Member States need to help them open safely,” said Dr John Nkengasong, Director of Africa CDC.

African Union through Africa CDC, in collaboration with Panabios and Econet, will continue to provide technical support to the Government of Kenya in operationalizing the platform and calls on other Member States to hook up to the platform for screening and verification of test results to ensure safe public health corridor across the continent.

Kenya is among the first countries that had been targeted in the first phase for the adoption of the portal.
Other countries targeted in the first phase include Ghana, Cape Verde, Togo, Senegal, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, South Africa, Rwanda, Morocco, Egypt , Liberia, Uganda and Namibia.

Some of the R&D partners helping in the initiative, with capabilities such as machine learning and blockchain fo instance Koldchain, have a presence in Kenya.

Due to the support of continental business associations such as AfroChampions, the services come at no cost to travellers.