All travellers exiting, entering or transiting through Ethiopia are expected to present digital negative COVID-19 certificates at all points of entry based on the Africa Union's Trusted Travel guidelines.
Ethiopia's Ministry of Health in a statement said the exercise will commence from June 7.
"Paper certificates shall cease to be acceptable and only AU Trusted Travel or Global Haven COVID-19 test certificates shall be allowed from July 1," the ministry said.
Ethiopia stated that the requirement for digital certificates was necessitated by an alarming increase of fake health documents and rising incidents of forgery since the onset of the pandemic.
"Ethiopia has collaborated with the African Union and Africa CDC, with technical support from the PanaBIOS Consortium, to implement an online system to authenticate and verify travellers' COVID-19 certificates in line with international rules and norms," the ministry said.
Those wishing to exit Ethiopia must first visit an authorized laboratory to take an RT-PCR COVID-19 test and be issued with Trusted Travel (TT) codes that can be verified by airlines and Port Health authorities across the continent.
A text message (SMS) will then be sent to the travellers from PanaBIOS. They will also receive an email from the testing laboratory and/or from [email protected] with a link to activate their account on trustedtravel.panabios.org website.
Travellers should endeavor to use the same email address they gave the Ethiopian laboratory when activating or registering an account on Trusted Travel website.
Technical concerns may be directed to the dedicated support teams reachable via [email protected].
All authorised RT-PCR COVID-19 testing laboratories have already been registered on the Alcan Pinion IT system.
Travellers entering or transiting Ethiopia from countries yet to comply with the Trusted Travel Initiative should use the special uploader available through the UNDP-supported Global Haven partnership (www.globalhaven.org) for Covid-19 test results.
They can also get vaccine certificate verification, which is available both on the Global Haven website and the Trusted Travel check-in pages.
"The AU Trusted Travel requirement applies to both categories of travellers: those travelling within Africa and those travelling from countries where there are labs integrated into the Trusted Travel system," MoH said.
(Edited by Bilha Makokha)
