Celebrating the 2025 African Day of Standardisation
By Every year in June, the African Day of Standardisation takes place. In 2025, ECOS will join ARSO (the African Organisation for Standardisation) and other key stakeholders in celebrating together as part of the ARSO week and in support of the ARSO-ECOS partnership agreement on environmental aspects of standards development in Africa. What role do standards play in Africa? How do ARSO, ECOS, and other stakeholders fit in? What are this year’s priorities? Find out below.
Standards that are developed with due attention to the environment can help to protect the natural ecosystems where raw materials — including transition minerals and agricultural products — are sourced. Given that Africa is an emerging as well as a secondary market for various products and services, standards are also growing in importance there, aiming to help support the development of clean technologies, promote circularity, and manage waste.
Standards are crucial for the global economy and trade. They touch all our lives by determining how products are made and sold — and how global supply chains for those products are managed. Africa plays a key role in these value chains, which we celebrate today on the 2025 African Day of Standardisation.
ARSO and ECOS: Partnered for the environment
After signing a Memorandum of Understanding in 2024, ARSO, the African Organisation for Standardisation, and ECOS are working together to strengthen environmental ambition and participation in African continental standards.
ARSO is an intergovernmental organisation with a mandate to harmonise African standards of interest to intra-African and global trade, while addressing the unique value chains across the African continent. With over 2,100 standards, ARSO is poised to provide a platform for adoption of harmonised standards and conformity assessment activities which promote the “One Standard, One Test, One Certificate, Accepted Everywhere” mantra of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
ECOS seeks be part of the effort to tackle environmental impacts and challenges in Africa by influencing the development of inclusive standards and technical policies, developed with local skills and expertise, and that promote the market uptake of clean technologies and sustainable products — regionally and internationally.
In alignment with ARSO’s programmes on Eco-Labelling, sustainability and resilient systems, ECOS brings the environmental voice to standards development — working in Africa, as well as in Europe and at the international level. Its goal is to ensure that standards are developed with the environment in mind with the participation of environmental stakeholders, helping to bring the most sustainable solutions to global challenges.
ARSO and ECOS envisage to work together to foster exchanges of information and best practices, increase technical capacity for standards development, and facilitate the inclusion of environmental stakeholders (including NGOs) to take part in standardisation activities.
African standards in 2025
This year, the African Day of Standardisation will be officially celebrated during the ARSO General Assembly week on 25 June in Zanzibar, Tanzania with the theme: Accelerating fair and just trade in Africa under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) through an African coherent regulatory framework and harmonised standards.
Together with other stakeholders, ARSO will facilitate impactful discussions on:
- The role of standards in implementation of the AfCFTA;
- Leveraging sustainability standards in renewable energy;
- Creating opportunities for fair and just intra-African and global trade.
ECOS will attend to share insights on:
- Its engagement with and lessons learnt in the implementation of a single-market system;
- Opportunities for robust quality infrastructure and standards development that includes environmental stakeholders;
- Key successes from the involvement of ECOS on regional and international standards.
The relevance of continental and regional standards
The African Day of Standardisation offers a platform and opportunity to exchange on the importance of continental and sub-regional standards for setting up the African Continental Free Trade Area and reducing technical trade barriers across the continent.
Through the ARSO-ECOS partnership, we aim to contribute to the development of African standards that promote sustainable development and are robust, inclusive, and representative of regional priorities through the effective consideration of environmental issues in standards development in Africa.
Resources
- ARSO website: https://www.arso-oran.org/
- ECOS article (June 2024), ‘ECOS partners with ARSO, the African Organisation for Standardisation’: https://ecostandard.org/news_events/ecos-partners-with-arso-the-african-organisation-for-standardisation/
- ECOS article (January 2024): ‘ECOS increases global reach with new Africa office’: https://ecostandard.org/news_events/ecos-increases-global-reach-with-new-africa-office/
