Quality Assured
In the words of Erik Ruh, the Quality Infrastructure Manager of ecbp, “the quality approach cannot be neglected if export levels should be raised, the educational background enriched and the technology level improved.”
The quality approach in the ambitious reform of the Engineering Capacity Building Program (ecbp) certainly has not been neglected. On February 27, 2009 the Council of Ministers approved the National Quality Infrastructure (NQI) Strategy, a very crucial step towards international competitiveness. The Strategy was developed by ecbp in close cooperation with the Quality and Standards Authority of Ethiopia (QSAE) and is the totality of public and private infrastructure required to establish and implement standardization, metrology, testing, certification, and accreditation services necessary to provide demonstrable and acceptable evidence that products and services meet defined requirements.
As a part of this NQI strategy, Ethiopia will have its own organizations accredited to issue certification for ISO 9001 Quality Management Systems. Just two days prior to the approval of the strategy, ecbp’s main partner concerning quality infrastructure, QSAE, received just such accreditation for their certification body, QSAE-Cert.
What exactly does it mean to have an accredited certification body? Well, previously, any Ethiopian company that wanted to demonstrate their quality levels by obtaining certification in ISO 9001 standards was forced to hire an expensive foreign accredited certification body authorized to award such certificates. Now, with QSAE-Cert, there is an organization within Ethiopia allowed to award ISO certificates which will be recognized all over the world.
To explain a little further, there are different levels in recognizing Quality. Accreditation bodies, such as the German TGA, which accredited QSAE-Cert, are responsible for accrediting certification bodies. These accredited certification bodies are then allowed to issue ISO certificates to qualified companies.
This is a significant achievement, not only for the hard working people of QSAE and ecbp, but for industry as a whole in Ethiopia. A major step forward in causing the words “Made in Ethiopia” to signify the aspects of real quality to buyers of the products carrying this mark.
In addition to QSAE-Cert’s achievement, the work that ecbp and consultant Handwerkskammer Rhein-Main of Germany have been doing in the area of training consultants and auditors to work with companies on attaining ISO standards enables Ethiopian companies to prepare for and in the end to attain this prestigious certification at much reduced costs. Hopefully this will encourage even more Ethiopian companies to take part in the process.