JOHANNESBURG - A surveillance report by Uganda’s national standards agency for 2017 and 2018 indicates that more than 54 percent of goods on the market are fake, but the public thinks as much as 80 percent of the goods are substandard, the Daily Monitor reported on Wednesday.
But the Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS) report also says trade in substandard goods has dropped from 73 percent as captured in a baseline study in 2013.
“From the study, it was established that a cross-section of products on the Ugandan market both imported and domestically manufactured are substandard,” said the UNBS report.
“On average, 54 percent of the sampled products failed tests for compliance to Ugandan standards. Under import inspection function, 133,517 contingents were inspected against planned inspection of 120,000,” the report added.
“This increase was largely due to the increased compliance to the PVOC (pre-export verification of conformity to standards) programme that requires that imports be inspected from their countries of export before entering Uganda.”
Out of 8.6 billion products inspected, about 33 million were found to be sub-standard and stopped from being imported into the country.
However, Ben Manyindo, the UNBS executive director explained that over half of the 54 percent substandard products were locally made and that local producers were being encouraged to register with UNBS and bring their commodities for verification.
- African News Agency (ANA)