JAKARTA, 7 October 2022– Altogether 26 trade professionals from 15 different countries took part in a joint study tour held in Braunschweig and Berlin, Germany, from 3 – 7 October.
The tour was the culmination of two courses on Quality Infrastructure for Sustainable Development (QuISP) in support of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB projects “Strengthening Quality Infrastructure in ASEAN” and “Upgrading of Quality Infrastructure in Africa”.
Each QuISP course is offered to about 20 young professionals from institutions related to trade negotiations and trade agreements, such as ministries of trade, trade promotion organisations, chambers of industry and commerce, and from other institutions such as standards bodies.
Its objective is to transfer knowledge and good practices concerning national, regional, and international quality infrastructure, specifically in the context of trade. The focus is on the five key pillars of quality infrastructure: standardisation, accreditation, conformity assessment, metrology, and market surveillance.
QuISP is a blended learning course – a mixture of centralised workshops or meetings, and individual online e-learning. However, due to meeting and travel restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the QuISP ASEAN course had to transition to online activities following an initial workshop held in Jakarta, Indonesia in February 2020, and the Pan-Africa QuISP course was held fully online in 2021.
This study tour was the first opportunity to fully round-off both courses for as many participants as possible with a concluding face-to-face event. It consisted of a mix of further study, visits to quality infrastructure institutions, presentations and discussions with key stakeholders within the German quality infrastructure.
Visits were made to PTB metrology laboratories, a commercial food testing laboratory, a major industrial manufacturing plant, and a State Calibration Service. Discussions were held with BMZ (the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development), the Representation of the European Commission in Germany, DIN (the German Institute for Standardization), and DAkkS (the German National Accreditation Body).
Additionally, participants were able to explore the relevance of trade diplomacy to trade-related agreements, consider studies on the economic benefits of standards, conduct an exercise on the decision-making process for technical regulations within the European Union, and reflect on their roles as trade professionals and discuss strategies to strengthen regional QI cooperation in their regions.
The special feature of this closing tour was that it brought together participants from the ASEAN region and the African Union for the first time to exchange across regions, learn from and with each other, and to encourage lasting professional relationships across institutions and regions.
With funds from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the study tour was implemented by PTB, the National Metrology Institute of Germany. Under the ongoing “Strengthening Quality Infrastructure in ASEAN” project, PTB has cooperated with the ASEAN Consultative Committee for Standards and Quality and its related sectoral bodies since 2019.
