Taiwo Hassan 
The Acting Regional Director of Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON), Lagos Region, Mrs. Theresa Ojomo, has stated that the Agency’s activities provide assurance for consumers to get value for their money.
Ojomo stated this during the road work of the Lagos Region of SON, in commemoration of the 2024 World Standards Day. According to her, World Standards Day is celebrated every October 14th, adding that the 2024 walk was to create awareness and to sensitise the public on standards and quality.
She said: “The theme of this year’s World Standards Day is “Our Shared Vision for a Better World.” So, we are looking at innovation, infrastructure, etc in this age of Atificial Intelligence.
“Therefore, SON’s role in helping to achieve the ‘SDG 9’ is focused on infrastructure, innovation and bringing all the SMEs, the Nano organisations, MSMEs to ensure that they have infrastructure, by using our products, such as MANCAP and SONCAP.
“We broke it down to the very small and micro organisations, encouraging them to imbibe standards and operate, even in a unit activity.
“We have brought in schemes that are very low in economy because the MSMEs have always complained that it is expensive to have standards conformity through the rigorous steps, such as application forms, test, quality assurance etc.”
She pointed out that SON only visited the micro and nanoes once in a year, explaining that that it was not cumbersome for them. “We also want to see that the process of certification is not expensive for them, hence, we move them to the MANCAP scheme which the SON is assuring even as small as the unit is,” she averred.
She emphasised that the role of SON was to provided assurance for consumers to get value for their money through production certification and standardisation.
“This is because we must conduct test to make sure that every product meets the prerequisite requirements, which is the purpose of certification and that is why we give product identification,” she said.
