Visit to Rwanda

The International Organization for Standardization, commonly known as ISO, is an international standards development organization composed of representatives of the national standards bodies of its member countries. The Standards Council of Canada (SCC) is the national standard body representing Canada. In total, ISO published nearly 25,000 standards in hundreds of different fields from manufactured products and technology to food safety, agriculture, and healthcare. Impressive, isn’t it?

One such field is quality management and quality assurance. The international technical committee responsible for standards in this field is ISO/TC 176. What’s more, this committee is responsible for one of the world’s most important international standard, ISO 9001. To date, more than a million organizations in over 170 countries are certified to this standard.

Did you know that Canada plays a crucial role in this committee? Indeed, the essential secretariat function has been entrusted to our country. Historically, Canada has provided the secretariat for this committee since its creation in 1979. To say that Canada plays an active role in the international standards industry is an understatement! Although the official National Standard Body is the SCC, the administration of the secretariat of the ISO/TC 176 committee was entrusted to the Canadian General Standards Board (CGSB) in 2020.

ISO/TC 176 holds a series of annual meetings called plenary meetings. Before the pandemic, these meetings were held in person in different member countries of ISO/TC 176, but for the past 3 years they have been held virtually. However, the committee decided to hold a hybrid (both in-person and virtual attendees) plenary meeting in 2023. The Rwanda Standards Board (the National Standards Body of Rwanda) offered to host the plenary, following an offer made in 2020 when the meetings were moved virtually.

This year, the 40th ISO/TC 176 plenary meeting took place from 9 to 13 October in Kigali, Rwanda. The meeting was led by chairperson of the ISO/TC 176 committee Jeffrey Hunt and attended with Canadian technical experts. The meeting was administered by CGSB’s Mark Schuessler and Purnima Hossain, as Committee Manager and Committee Manager Support respectively. One of the aims of the plenary was to discuss the process for future revision of the ISO 9001 standard.