This year’s edition of the Standards Association of Zimbabwe (SAZ)’s National Annual Quality Awards (NAQA) event is set to be held November at Elephant Hills Hotel in the resort town of Victoria Falls. This was announced by the national standards body in an advertisement this week.
The NAQA awards will be held as part of SAZ’s “Zimbabwe Standards Week,” which includes two other events: the Business Leaders’ Conference and the World Standards Day from 20 to 22 November. The theme of the events is “Business resilience and growth in a VUCA environment.”
SAZ called for NAQA entries in July and this ran until 30 August. The standards body highlighted that the awards are “open to certified and non-certified companies.”
“The objectives of the awards include “to recognise organizations that excel in continuous quality improvement, to motivate organisations to adhere to proper quality business norms (and) to encourage organizations to comply with local, regional and international quality standards,” says SAZ on its website.
SAZ further indicates that the aim of NAQA is to encourage business excellence through the sustained application of productivity and quality principles in large, small and medium scale enterprises in Zimbabwe.
The awards are divided into five categories.
The first category, the company of the year, awards a small and medium enterprise (SME) and a large (LE) one which have “proactively and effectively implemented quality principles” while the second category, the product of the year, awards are handed to “a product that best reflects a commitment to quality.”
The third category, which is dubbed the service of the year, recognises an SME and an LE which are “locally-delivered service that best reflects a commitment to local production and quality.” The fourth category, the individual award for quality, is an “award given to an individual that has made significant input into National Standards, Quality Assurance, Accreditation and Metrology (SQAM) efforts.”
The last category, the exporter of the year award, recognises an SME and an LE “that has made significant progress in commencing or expanding exports to new or wider markets by introducing quality in their company.”
The winners of the Zimbabwean national competition will automatically qualify for the SADC Annual Quality Awards next year.
For the purposes of the awards adjudication, SAZ defines an SME as an enterprise with less than 100 employees while an LE is viewed as a company with more than 100 employees.
NAQA is organized by the National Standardization, Quality Assurance, Accreditation and Metrology (SQAM) Sub- Committee which forms an integral part of the national quality infrastructure and is represented by SAZ, the Scientific and Industrial Research and Development Centre (SIRDC)’s National Metrology Institute, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce’s Trade Measures Department, the Medicines Control Authority of Zimbabwe (MCAZ) and the National Laboratory Association of Zimbabwe (NLAZ).