The Sunday News
Thandeka Matebesi, Business Reporter
ZIMBABWE has made significant strides towards introducing policies and regulations that enable companies to package their products in-line with international standards.
Standard Association of Zimbabwe (SAZ) director-certification service Mr Sebastian Zuze said the standards and conformity assessment body was constantly reviewing companies’ standards in an effort to ensure they are in line with international trends.
“Our role is to protect consumers through the use of standards. In other words we make sure that consumers do not consume products that can be harmful to them. We want people to hold SAZ accountable…There are two pointers to standards review. The first one is that at any given time if there are changes in new information coming in, a standard can be changed at any given time. Companies are given time for transition, in other words to make sure they become compliant to the new standard but ordinarily after every four years standards become due for review whether there is new thinking or not,” said Mr Zuze.
He said packaging of products was of paramount importance towards enhancing companies’ marketing and brand recognition in their bid to attract customers.
“In Zimbabwe there is a packaging legislation, which should be adhered to by anyone doing labelling (of products). There are also regulations on colours to be used for bottling and the information that companies should include when labelling. For example the Food Standards Advisory Board governs labeling, among many things with regards to food in Zimbabwe through the Ministry of Health and Child Care. It actually specifies that if you are bottling water the label must be this way, how the bottle itself should be. In Zimbabwe a company cannot bottle water in a coloured bottle. These standards were developed from SAZ and they are then referenced by the relevant bodies,” said Mr Zuze.
He said one of SAZ’s objectives was to ensure that services and goods by local companies were competitive on the global market.
SAZ’s role is to make Zimbabwean goods and services competitive.
“Simplified, it means we want to make sure that our industry’s goods and services are favourably priced compared to those from other countries who are doing the same products or offering the same services as our companies. In other words if we have bread from South Africa and Zimbabwe, the role of SAZ is to make sure that our bread is much cheaper. This enables our country to make more money through exports.”
He said last year SAZ had an increase of 10 percent of companies inquiring about standards.
“We introduced a scheme where we are trying to encourage companies to use standards and we made it very simple for them. This resulted in about 10 percent increase in enquiries, with companies coming through to say they would like to participate in adopting standards.
“We also saw an increase in certifications in the security sector. We also tightened our control in terms of water bottlers to make sure that the monitoring regime becomes much more thorough. We wanted to respond to concerns raised that some of the certified bottled water was not really safe,” said Mr Zuze.
