First ISO 9001 Certificate
A series of trainings and advisory support on Quality Management system and Products Certification System covering various international standards such as ISO 9001, ISO 22000, ISO 22003: 2022 and ISO 17021: 2015 was held in Burundi.
The staff of National Burundi Bureau of Standards and Quality Control (BBN) and other institutions of the Burundi quality infrastructure (QI) attended these trainings with support from the EU funded MARKUP project implemented by the International Trade Centre.
Until November 2022, the BBN could certify only products amongst its scopes of action.
Auditors of BBN were coached and mentored to carry out audit of management systems in enterprises.
Selected BBN’s staff were certified auditors of ISO 9001 and 22000 by bureau VERITAS Kenya. Consequently, BBN was able to conduct audits of a few SMEs.
In this connection, the first certification on Quality management system was issued to Grain Milling Company on 16 November 2022 while other SMEs are waiting for benefiting from this service that was so far sourced from abroad at high cost.
With the help of support from the project, Burundi products and services will gain added recognition at the regional and international level.
We are grateful to ITC’s intervention through MARKUP Project, this achievement is historical for Burundi industry. Such service was sourced outside in the last years, but thanks to this support BBN is now able to carry out the program and deliver the certification of management systems. Now we are confident that the company’s system complies with international standards. We hope to see our products more trusted than ever, and we expect to receive more demand from regional markets,” representative of Grain Mill said.
The Director of BBN said: “BBN is now empowered in both technical and material capacities to carry out its missions. Before MARKUP intervention, BBN was limited to certify only products, but thanks to the support, from now on, BBN is able to carry out audit of the quality management systems of institutions and enterprises and issue recognized certificate that will enable them to uplift their products and services to another and higher level of recognition at regional and international markets” The law of Burundi grants BBN with this power of doing and BBN is confident that thanks to the capacity building that the MARKUP Burundi project provided, BBN we will bring positive change in the concerned areas.
