GDRFA-Dubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates: Innovation of the Year

Written answers to the questions

Total 145 words used.

The General Directorate of Residency and Foreigners Affairs is a governmental sector that focuses solely on entry permits, violators follow-up, and Airports within the UAE. During past performances, the following processes were achieved:

• The entry permit service used to take around 7 working days and relied on customers visiting the establishment to complete the service/process.
• The Airport flow also took time as the process involved various fingerprint and biometric inputs.
• Many documents were forged on entry to the UAE.
• Many violators lived inside the UAE. Some violators have violated for more than 20 years, whereas some other visitors stayed in the country and were unfortunate enough to have violated entry permit laws due to the closure of their airports.

Before 2020, the organization was ranked Champion from the Global Innovation Institute (GInI). In addition, the organization was ranked among the lowest organizations in achieving innovation.

Total 250 words used.

The organization outcomes during the course of 2 years(2020-2022). The achievements include:

• The introduction of the GDRFAD-App to facilitate the permit process with ease.
• Smart Amer services that aid customers by facilitating many services including entry permits, ID renewal as well as residence.
• The introduction of the e-gates and smart tunnel as part of the innovative initiatives that worked in a large scale in Dubai Airports which increased the overall flow of the entry to the UAE.The gates also reduced the overall amount of time from 15 minutes to 10 to20 seconds.
• The creation of an enhanced smart reader that replaces the document forgery specialists through advanced technology that compares the document with an original document stored in the devices database.The reader helped reduce the overall time to check on the forged documents from 20 minutes to 9 seconds. Moreover, the rate of forged documents took a downfall thanks to the new readers. Additionally, the organization is working on making the reader work remotely.
• The introduction to a major initiative in the UAE which depicts 2 scenarios, the first one being a scenario where the violator pays a small fee to remove his fines and clear his/her records.The second scenario is where the government will take care of all charges as long as the violator returns to the country of residence.
• After2020, the organization got ranked Leader internally by the standards of GInI.

The organization was ranked the best organization in achieving innovation by the Government of Dubai.

Total 250 words used.
Years before 2020, we notice major changes when comparing them to the current situation.The following comparisons make the selected achievements unique or significant:

• The introduction to the organization app(GDRFAD)helped reduce the amount of effort the customer takes to receive the entry permit from7 working days to a few minutes. This is achieved by having customers upload all their necessary documents through the app.
• The Smart gates and Smart Tunnel projects helped save millions of dirhams’ worth of process to Dubai Airports as the overall time to complete service per consumer has been reduced from15minutes to an average of15seconds. The smart gates also increased the overall efficiency due to the reduction of time taken to achieve the process.
• Before Smart Reader, the organization had to rely on document forgery specialists who took minutes to check on each document. Another issue would occur if the specialist was not available on site which would cause a huge delay on the process,but by introducing the smart reade,we don’t need to rely on specialist’s every time an unusual situation occurs.Consequently, the database that is built with the reader helps reduced the overall time to achieve the process by comparing the document with the sampled original document at a quick rate.
• Before-the-violators --initiative, many-violator- were-either-scared-to-visit the GDRFA-Dubai-as-they-feared being-deported. When the-initiative-was first-introduced, the visitors still had some doubts. But, with time many violators-were able to clear their name and were reassured that the process is safe and easy. After the-initiative, the violators-were-reduced to-only-10%-of-the-total-amount-of-violators-before-the-initiative.