The West Africa Quality System Programme (WAQSP), funded by the European Union and implemented by UNIDO, continues to play a useful role in the ranks of its beneficiaries. Thus, it was organized, from April 30 to May 3, 2019, in Cotonou, a training workshop for managers and resource persons on the requirements of the ISO 17025 version 2017 standard for the upgrade of a dozen of calibration and test laboratories in Benin.

The goal of this capacity-building workshop is to help accelerate the transition process, which will give laboratories the appropriate technical expertise for testing and other operations. Also, these labs and their qualified staff have been trained on the new version of this standard.

At the opening, Youssouf Mama Sika, National Technical Coordinator (NTC-WAQSP), highlighted the various components and axes of the training. According to him, it consisted of three packages, the first of which concerns the accreditation body, the second concerns the quality management organization in a laboratory and the third deals with the technical organization in a laboratory. "Through this training funded by the WAQSP, we provide laboratories with the necessary tools to enable them to make the transition within 3 years," he said. Hubert Kona Charles, Quality Manager of the Laboratory for Testing and Research in Civil Engineering (LERGC), welcomed the organization of the training which strengthens the technical skills of the participants and contributes to the upgrading of the laboratories targeted for the application of ISO 17025 version 2017. "It intervenes at the request of accredited laboratories, because they must comply with the new standard," he testified.

At the end of the three-day training, the associated laboratories were able to coop with the technical requirements related to measurement systems, equipment management, measurement traceability and others in order to integrate them into their quality system.