Accreditation

As the accreditation is the key to international recognition and is identified as a national concern, the Egyptian Accreditation Council (EGAC) is placed at the top of the hierarchy of Egyptian conformity assessment structure. EGAC is an autonomous body and the sole accreditation body, and it represents the point of view of all the interested parties and stakeholders by merging National Laboratories Accreditation Bureau (N LAB) and Egyptian Accreditation Council (EGAC) in one accreditation body.

National Quality Programme supports (EGAC) to be internationally recognised by International Laboratories Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC) and International Accreditation Forum (IAF), and to create a database including all accredited testing and calibration labs in Egypt and also a pool of assessors in different fields of accreditation ( testing / calibration laboratories, inspection bodies, and certification bodies) in accordance with the requirements of the ISO standards 17025, 17020, and 7021.

• Certification bodies for management systems:
  NQP supports these bodies to be competent in the field of certifying organisations management system of the industrial organisations according to the requirements of the international standards e.g. ISO 9001, 4001, 22000 ,...etc.
  
  
• Certification bodies for products
  This activity will gain importance over the next several years. Hence, the NQP supports improving the utilization of accreditation and developing a few institutions already performing tasks such as prototype approval, laboratory testing, surveillance visits and product mark licensing schemes to international best practice levels.
  
  

• Certification bodies for personnel
  In this branch of certification, well-defined skills and competencies of individual persons will be certified as a support discipline for other fields of conformity assessment, e.g. certification of auditors, certification of welders or certification of non-destructive testing inspectors.To qualify for issuing certificates for personnel, the certification body must demonstrate good quality assurance.
  
  
• Inspection bodies
  This category covers a broad range of inspection activity. Quite a few of such bodies will emerge from the transformation of government control institutions. An inspection body may mostly make use of technical testing and will often be organized in conjunction with test laboratories.
  
  
• Testing laboratories
  This is the largest group of conformity assessment providers including laboratories for chemical and microbiological analysis, as well as laboratories for electronic and mechanical testing. NQP supports several hundreds of testing laboratories of various sizes and organisations to be accredited and take part in the decentralised national structure of conformity assessment, while some of these labs include inspection as part of their activities.

Calibration Laboratories
Calibration laboratories typically act as a support discipline for quality assurance of the measuring equipment used by industries as well as test laboratories. Calibration laboratories are instrumental in establishing traceability to national and international metrological standards, thus linking the scientific metrology to the industrial level.

Laboratory Proficiency Testing Scheme
This represents a highly specialised activity for the accredited laboratories to prove the efficiency of the actual testing process and that they are able to run accurate tests or produce analytical results comparable with results obtained by a reference laboratoryThe activity requires access to a pivotal laboratory that will act as the reference or primary laboratory of each test and generally must have the h ighest level of expertise and equipment.A further requirement of the laboratory proficiency testing scheme provider is that it should participate in international comparisons.

The National Quality Programme supports the National Institute for Standardisation NIS in establishing a Proficiency testing unit.

National Quality Institute

The role of the National Quality Institute (NQI), as a house of quality, will be constantly further progress and change. It will work mostly with time-limited project activities. Once the quality programme is successfully completed, the NQI will identify the sustainable fields of its act ivity and competency. It will develop these into community services suitable for the demand of the Egyptian business and conformity assessment society.