EIAC attended ISO meetings

Ms. Amina Ahmed Mohammed Chair of Arab Accreditation Cooperation (ARAC) and CEO of EIAC attended the ISO Annual Meeting 2022 in Abu Dhabi, UAE. She participated in ISO session that was organized in collaboration with IAF and ILAC. The session was arranged to discuss the digital transformation of conformity assessment with regard to the COVID 19 pandemic.

During Q & A session, she said the accreditation community did organize itself promptly as soon as the pandemic was announced, fast response working groups were created, and both organizations shifted their work to remote work and applied their extraordinary event procedures that existed before the pandemic. ILAC and IAF did also make sure that the confidence in conformity assessment result is preserved especially during the pandemic where these services are sometimes literally vital. A website was created to collect questions and publish FAQs and guidance, this allowed CABs and stakeholders from around the world to continue providing their services in a harmonized and effective way.

She further said, facing to such extraordinary event, there was surely a need to harmonize practices worldwide, that’s why ILAC, IAF and the regional Accreditation Groups did promptly establish the mechanisms to have an agreement on the way to continue providing CA services while preserving the confidence in the Multilateral arrangements. This is not limited to the pandemic situation. The pandemic did maybe accelerate the process, but the accreditation community was since many years harmonizing its digital work and the adaptation to new technologies imperatives.

In response to another question she said, the main purpose of accreditation is to provide confidence the competence of the conformity assessment services provided within the national, regional and global quality infrastructure. By building this trust, accreditation facilitates trade, allows for comparability of results worldwide, and hence consumer protection and economic growth. With the development of new schemes and emergence of new industries that require conformity assessment activities, accreditation adapts by gathering the experts from around the world to establish the chain of trust and cover it by it Multilateral recognition arrangements.