The Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS) has intensified standards awareness campaigns amongst Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) to improve the quality of their products.
UNBS is a statutory body responsible for developing, promoting and enforcing standards to facilitate fair trade, promote local industries and protect consumers.
With support from the Standards Partnership Project under the Foreign Common wealth Development Office (FCDO)-UKAID, UNBS has simplified key hygiene and labelling standards; US 28 EAS 39:2002: Code of practice for hygiene in the Food and Drink Manufacturing Industry and US EAS 38:2014: Labelling of Pre-packaged Foods – General requirements to create awareness within the MSMEs in order to improve the quality and marketability of their products.
During the handover ceremony of the simplified standards at UNBS head office in Bweyogerere, the UNBS Deputy Executive Director in charge of standards, Mrs. Patricia Bageine Ejalu noted that the simplification of standards will help MSMEs understand standards better because they are of great importance in ensuring that products and services in Uganda are safe.
Mrs. Ejalu further revealed the need to build export capacity for Uganda through certification of all MSMEs’ products, to ensure that what they produce for export is of good quality.
Mr. Enoch Mutumba, a Local Expert under the Standards Partnership Project FCDO-UKAID emphasized that standardisation and certification is the way to go for all manufacturers and urged UNBS to accelerate standards awareness amongst MSMEs.
A total of 28,000 brochures of simplified standards guidelines have been received by UNBS for capacity building and training activities aimed at improving market access for MSMEs’ products both locally and internationally.