Conform to International standards - GSB

Accra, Nov. 15, GNA - The Ghana Standard Board (GSB) on Tuesday organized a day's workshop for dealers in the paper industry to streamline operations to ensure the production of quality products that would meet consumer expectation and conform to international standards. The workshop is one of a series to register clients, identify malpractices and help ensure that goods sold on the Ghanaian market are of the best quality and meet international standards.

Mr Lawrence Yankey, Acting Executive Director, said the GSB was mandated to ensure the safety of the consumers as well as ensure that goods sold on the Ghanaian market were of the best quality and urged dealers in the paper industry to cooperate with the Board to bring sanity into the industry.

"Quality was increasingly becoming the key to business success and indeed the passport to the international market", he noted, and said it was, therefore, imperative for companies to focus on standards to promote quality in order to satisfy the needs of customers or target markets on a continuous basis.

"The mark of conformity is going to be a marketing tool that would enable producers sell more while consumers also buy with the assurance that goods bought would be safe and suitable for use", he said. He noted that paper and its related products were crucial for the development of every nation because of the various usages, principal among them being the production of textbooks and for record keeping. Mr Yankey said though computerisation was making organizational processes less paper friendly, it would continue to play a significant role in educational programmes, especially in this part of the world. The Acting Executive Director gave the assurance that the testing of product would take 48 hours after, which the good ones would be released.

He said a registration form had been designed and would be distributed to the dealers to enable the Board to know who was bringing what into the country.

The registration, he said, would require those in the industry to indicate the name of the companies, locations, products, addresses, type of business, brand, and the monogram or trademark of the company concerned among other things.

Participants were taken through registration of companies, certification, labelling requirements for paper products and features of the mark of conformity.