By Sarjo S. Jammeh
Standards are frameworks needed to assure product safety, ensure that products and materials are tailored to their purpose, facilitate trade by removing trade barriers, and promote a common understanding of a product. They ensure consistent practices, quality, and efficiency throughout the entire production and distribution chain.
Maintaining and implementing these standards is essential for business and the trade sector.
The Gambia is not left out in this endeavor. The Government has established The Gambia Standards Bureau (TGSB), the country’s leading quality infrastructure institution. The Bureau’s main purpose is to standardize methods, processes, and products. It promotes standardization, conformity assessment, and metrology in the fields of industry and commerce to support industrial efficiency and development.
Horticulture has great prospects in The Gambia. It is a key driver of incomes, jobs, and poverty reduction, especially among women. However, despite these prospects, women and other actors have been grappling with challenges in the horticultural production sector.
These challenges include responsiveness to market requirements and the horticulture value chain actors’ non-compliance with standards.
These challenges have hindered the sector’s growth and competitiveness. This is where the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), through the West Africa Competitiveness Programme—The Gambia (WACOMP-GM), comes in.
The European Union-funded WACOMP-GM project brought a gleaming hope for both horticulture producers and quality infrastructure institutions like TGSB.
The project has supported TGSB in developing 12 national horticultural standards for onions and allied crops. These standards cover, among other things, the specification of onions, good agricultural practices, good manufacturing practices, handling, storage, labeling, and packaging of horticultural produce.
The project supplied equipment to the Bureau and developed the capacities of their technicians, not just the development of standards.
“All these capacity building trainings are geared towards strengthening the technical capacity of TGSB and support in the development of relevant national standards,” said Papa Secka, Director General of The Gambia Standards Bureau.
He added that these trainings were mainly related to operating and analyzing in the Laboratory using equipment the project had supplied.
According to Adalberto Carvalho Santos Vieira, UNIDO International Quality Infrastructure Expert, the training is directly related to the TGSB mandate. It is expected to improve technicians’ skills and boost institutional development by allowing knowledge transfer and sharing of best practices.
Meanwhile, Abdoulie F. Njie is a TGSB Laboratory Technician at the National Quality Laboratory in Abuko.
Abdoulie is one of the trainees who later became a trainer who benefitted from numerous WACOMP-GM trainings.
He was one of the trained trainers hired by the project to teach women gardeners across the country how to assemble and operate the 120 weighing scales procured by the project.
He is now busy at the National Metrology Laboratory, where he was meticulously putting into practice the knowledge and skills he gained from the WACOMP-GM training.
While he was full of praise for the knowledge he gained from their training, Abdoulie said the training he underwent has significantly boosted his understanding of laboratory equipment and, by extension, the weighing scale.
“This project really helped me a lot, I cannot overstate how helpful this project was, but we owe UNIDO through WACOMP a lot for impacting on us the knowledge of assembling and calibrating scales,” he said.
He noted that women vegetable producers are now comfortable using the weighing scales WACOMP-GM provided and have realized that these scales are more effective than their traditional way of weighing.
“Before these scales came, they used pots and other containers to measure. Sometimes, they run at a loss, but now that is a thing of the past,” added Abdoulie.
As part of the project, WACOMP-GM purchased, among other things, an extensive list of field and benchtop testing equipment, laboratory glassware, and furniture for TGSB’s National Food Testing Laboratory.
TGSB also received valuable equipment for monitoring food condition/conformity. The field equipment includes thermometers, pH meters, refractometers, and palm oil testers.
Commenting on the relevance of this equipment, the Director General of TGSB, Papa Secka, said they are used in the Laboratory to test certain parameters related to the quality of products like onions. They also test equipment for the quality of palm oil and some parameters in fruit juices.
“We received a series of training on how our laboratory technicians should operate this equipment; we also received training on inspection procedures as well as training on certain standards that are relevant for food safety,” said TGSB Director Secka.
Currently, the project is working with the Government on developing the country’s first National Laboratory Policy. Once fully implemented, this policy will assist in balancing current laboratory capacities and provide guidance on the efficient allocation of scientific and technical professional staff and other laboratory-related resources within the laboratory infrastructure of The Gambia.
“The policy will address issues such as duplications, wastage of resources, competence issues, sharing expertise and knowledge, and many other relevant issues,” added DG Secka.
Speaking with optimism, Secka heaped praise on the EU-funded UNIDO- WAMCOP-GM project, revealing that they are optimistic about the future of testing and standards related to food before establishing the first accredited Laboratory.
“The National Laboratory Policy can be a valuable tool for the Government of The Gambia to unite all stakeholders around a common understanding of the current situation and the ways forward by helping set the objectives for how the laboratory infrastructure should be changed, adapted, and upgraded, to address the identified needs in an even more coherent and effective way,” Adalberto Carvalho Santos Vieira explained further.
“Certainly, the training they provided was timely in the sense that it comes at a time when we started the establishment of a food testing laboratory to address challenges related to food testing, and the equipment they provided was not only useful for checking the parameters on the quality of foods and horticultural products but also very important on our side to be able to do some research for standard development purpose,” added TGSB Director Secka.
