Gaborone
Etosha Fishing and MPP Civils won at the sixth SADC Annual Quality Awards.
Etosha Fishing won the Southern Africa Regional Exporter of the Year Award in the large enterprise category, while the MPP Civil won the Southern Africa Regional Service of the Year Award in the small and medium enterprise category.
The awards took place in Gaborone, Botswana, last week.
MPP Civils is a Namibian civil engineering company owned by a group of young Namibians. It is the first Namibian construction and contracting company in civil engineering to be awarded an ISO 9001:2008 Quality Management System certification by the Namibian Standards Institution (NSI).
MPP Civils is duty-bound to ensure that it continues to satisfy the requirements of the ISO 9001:2008 standard, as well as abide by the terms and conditions of the Certification Scheme. Most other construction companies in the country are licensed by outside authorities.
It is the second year in a row that Etosha Fishing has won the SADC regional exporter’s award. Last year, Etosha Fishing also won the SADC Company of the Year – Large Enterprises.
The regional exporter of the year award is awarded to a company or organisation that has made significant progress in commencing or expanding exports to new or wider markets by introducing quality in their company.
Etosha Fishing set the standard for value addition to Namibia’s national fish by launching its own EFUTA product range of canned horse mackerel in tomato sauce, chilli and salt water. It is the first Namibian canned product to receive the local Standard Mark of Conformity product endorsement.
Apart from its local distribution, EFUTA is currently being exported to the following SADC countries: Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe Swaziland, Mozambique, Botswana and South Africa.
Export markets in the process of being established include Angola, Benin, Nigeria and Tanzania. The SADC annual quality awards competition is one of the ways in which SADC promotes the use of standards and quality tools in the region. Companies are recognized for having robust quality management systems that have demonstrably contributed to the growth of their businesses. Entrants to the regional competition have to win the national competition in their own country.
The aim of the SADC quality awards is to recognise organisations and individuals contributing to quality advancement in all sectors of SADC, and who use quality advancement to support economic development and growth. This year’s regional awards had 26 entries from seven SADC countries, with Zambia and Botswana, participating for the first time.
Other participating countries were Lesotho, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa. The entries came from eight large enterprises and nine small and medium enterprises. The categories were for regional company of the year, regional product of the year, regional exporter of the year, and regional service of the year.
“We have noted an improvement in the entry for the sixth round of the competition,” said Maureen Mutasa, the member of the adjudication panel and the chief executive officer for Southern African Development Community Accreditation Service (SADCAS).
“The panel is of the view that the awards are progressing well – we however would like to ask that all 15 SADC member states encourage participation in the awards,” Mutasa said.
SADCAS is a subsidiarity organization of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and is a non-profit, multi-economy accreditation body whose mission is to provide credible, cost-effective accreditation services for SADC member states aimed at supporting regional and international trade, and enhancing the protection of consumers and the environment.
The SADC Executive Secretary, Dr Stergomena Lawrence Tax, in a statement read on her behalf, said the secretariat is delighted that the competition keeps on gaining momentum. She added that the awards demonstrate that quality improvement efforts must first start with individual countries if they are to succeed at region level.
Tax said the call for regional industrialisation and champions of development has to be accentuated by quality, so that the region can participate in the global value chain, because standards and quality issues are harmonised not for global participation, but also to accelerate regional trade.