The Rwanda Standards Board (RSB) is planning to enact laws to regulate weights, measures and verification in different areas.

Currently Rwanda has no law regulating metrology and regulation, but relies on consumer protection law.

As part of the move, RSB last week organised a workshop where experts in metrology explored ways of improving verification and measurements of supplies in the country.

Filbert Zimulinda, the National Metrology Division Manager in RSB explained that currently verification is done on counter balancers, fuel pumps, medical instruments like thermometers, among others but there is need for improvement.

"We have a challenge of with counter balancers that are not standardised, this causes losses to both buyers and sellers, we hope that laws will enable us to overcome these challenges,” Zimulinda added.

Florian Paffenholz, an expert in metrology from Germany said there are many challenges in regulation where there are several things to verify.

"We have to regulate measuring instruments to ensure consumer protection in every transaction of trade. Then we have other fields like health which concerns people’s lives, the instruments to be used there should be verified like blood pressure instruments or thermometers and we have other things like environmental controllers, so there are many fears where there is no legal regulation to verify them,” Florian said.

Florian said verifying these instruments under the consumer protection law has technical issues.

"They try to measure them but international good practices call for a law on metrology measurements and verification, where all measuring instruments are regulated,” said Paffenholz.

Brian Beard, a legal metrology consultant said that the law on metrology and its regulations should take into account the global trends and implications.

He added that the scope of legal metrology measurements should depend on the requirements of a country, where they could cover medical, safety environment measurements.

At the workshop, experts reviewed the East African laws regarding metrology measurement and verification to avoid setting up contradicting laws.

editorial@newtimes.co.rw