As Ghana joined the rest of the world to commemorate this year’s World Quality Day, the Ghana Standards Authority and the Food and Drugs Authority have called on Ghanaians to demand quality service from institutions and service providers.
According to the two bodies, “quality is not negotiable” therefore producers and service providers must endeavour to enforce trust in their consumers by upholding quality standards.
The 2018 quality day celebration took place at the University of Professional Studies, Accra on Thursday and was under the theme The Role of Leaders in Building Trust-based Quality Culture.
Speaking at the event, the Chief Executive Officer of the Food and Drugs Authority, Delese Mimi Darko said achieving a quality culture within an organization was a shared responsibility amongst members of that organogram, and added that commitment to customer needs was essential to the survival of any brand in the 21st century.
“Commitment to customer needs is to be a key driver of the quality culture and the leaders have had to have a key interest in the quality culture of their organization. We need to listen to our customers and therefore, recently the FDA which we did not have before, we are now on Twitter, we are now on WhatsApp, we are now on Facebook, we are now on Instagram to listen and interact with our clients, ” she said.
Contributing to the above theme, the CEO of the Ghana Standards Authority, Prof Alexander Dodoo, however, believes consumers in the country have been shortchanged for long and it was time they stood up and demanded quality service and products from producers and service providers.
This he says could be achieved with a change in the mindset. “What I am hoping is that this World Quality Day celebration will mark a change in mindset. Is the philosophy which is important. By the time you leave here you need to question everything- are the chairs here quality? Are the standards that you are using for your training consistent? Are they fair? …because in countries where people have developed, their young men and women stand for the values they believe in,” he said.
The Vice-Chancellor of UPSA, Prof Abednego Feehi Okoe Amartey in a speech read on his behalf by the Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Professor Charles Barnor acknowledged the importance of trust in a public management environment.
According to him, trust oils the machinery of every successful enterprise and the recent disturbance at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology should serve as a lesson for managers of higher educational institutions.
“It is therefore important for the university administrators to give the students leaders adequate opportunity to play their roles in the university governance. With high level of trust, management staff and students will openly discuss what is going wrong as well as what is working, and also seek answers and move forward together to fix any problems,” Prof Amartey said.
The Vice-Chancellor is also calling for reforms in the management of higher institution to establish quality systems that could sharpen the leadership skills of students to enable them fit into the larger society.
The World Quality Day is celebrated annually across the globe on the second Thursday of November. It is a day meant to encourage positive reflection and the role that quality plays in the lives of consumers. It also provides an opportunity for quality management students and professionals to share experiences as well as learning new ways to be quality-focused.
This year’s celebration was held in collaboration with the UPSA School of Graduate Studies Total Quality Management students.
