By Kefiloe Kajane
The minister of trade and industry Thabiso Molapo this week undertook an inspection tour of the Lesotho Standards Institute (LSI) to observe progress made since its inception last year.
The institute was established by the ministry as part of standards compliance on goods produced locally.
The LSI was set up to develop and publish the national standards, testing and certification of various local products as well as to conduct trainings on standards- related matters.
Molapo indicated that the institution is slowly starting to work even though it is currently focused on testing bottled water. At present, Molapo noted, there were no enough machines to test other products.
He said his visit was to observe the progress made while also assessing the needs for the institute to operate on fully accepted scale.
He indicated that the LSI is set to be great help in testing bottled water as the resource is one of the country’s great products
This according to him, would enable producers of bottled water to break into international markets thus help grow the kingdom’s economy.
“We are planning to bring together bottled water producers so that the experts will enlighten them on what factors to look out for when producing the items. They will also be taught on skills for being good competitors,” he promised.
The LSI’s laboratory analyst Lesala Ntṧoeu said some of the challenges he has experienced was that bottled water producers are unable to enter the international market due to failure to meet technical requirements.
“Technical requirement can include standards and the fact that the product needs to be tested by an expert. I plead with our bottled water producers to work together with us. This is because they really have a potential but sometimes you will find that they copy and paste their labeling from where ever it comes from. When we test the product we find that the labelling does not match the content.
“They commit slight mistakes but which can cost them their business. So I think it is important that they work with us so that they can get things right for the sake of their business growth,” Ntṧoeu pleaded.
The lack of a functional standards body is one of the biggest technical barriers deterring local producers from entering into both export markets and local formal markets.
