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Odumodu seeks common standards policy for Africa

By on April 12, 2014

The President, African Organisation for Standards, Dr Joseph Odumodu, has urged the governments of African countries to develop a common standard policy as a way to curb the influx of sub-standard goods into the continent.

Odumodu, who is also the Director-General of the Standards Organisation of Nigeria, said during the ARSO council meeting in Accra that African countries needed to share their successes and failures to attain industrialisation.

A statement by the council on Thursday reported him to have said there was the need to address the problems of industrialisation, standards harmonisation and ensure that youths on the continent were gainfully employed in order to build better future.

“ARSO seeks to facilitate intra-African and global trade through providing and facilitating the implementation of harmonised standards,’’ he was quoted as saying.

The statement added that Odumodu expressed concern that trade among African countries amounted to less than 10 per cent, saying that African countries needed to see to their economic independence, by increasing the volume of intra-African trades.

On the way forward, he urged Africa to speak with one voice in order to stop the dumping of substandard products on the continent.

Odumodu also said that low literacy levels, coupled with poor infrastructure, are hampering efforts to achieve standardisation in Africa.

Without standardisation, he stated, Africa would not be able to develop rapidly and provide employment for the youths.

According to him, due to poverty and low literacy levels in the continent, most people tend to patronise sub-standard goods from Asia.

He added that over the years, Africa had been exporting labour to the rest of the world, and importing poverty, pointing out that by buying inferior goods from Asia, Africa was providing employment for the citizenry of those countries and thereby becoming poorer.

Odumodu said goods produced locally were of higher quality standards than those imported from Asia, because of the enforcement of strict standardisation regulations, and urged that they should be patronised.

 

 

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