Under the “Six countries, one region” tag line, the RCC’s next event will take the form of a hybrid meeting: six colleagues who specialise in consular services at our six representations in Central America will meet in person in Costa Rica, from where they will conduct a video call with our Swiss community. All six countries around our region – Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama – face similar challenges.
Take passport applications, for example, for which there is no online facility. In this difficult year, our mobile passport offices (excluding consular services) will therefore again be touring neighbouring countries. This has proved a very popular, successful initiative to date.
Ultimately, we are focusing on elderly members of society who have been particularly affected by the pandemic. Embassy staff will travel to remote regions to listen to the concerns of our retirees and answer their questions. This will not only lend our services a human face, but help us better understand the needs of older Swiss Abroad.
Swiss embassy in San José, Costa Rica
Ottawa / Canada
A simultaneous live stream from three different regions of our vast country
The Covid-19 pandemic has severely restricted our freedom of movement. But it has widened our horizons too. Given the global dimensions of the crisis, this means thinking outside the box to come up with good ideas that will enhance consular services. The “community meetings” hosted by the Swiss embassy in Thailand (see article on the left) were an inspiration for us in Canada to do something similar. However, we had to tailor our own virtual town hall meetings to Canadian specificities, because the sheer size of our country, along with its federal structure, have resulted in each province implementing different Covid guidelines.
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