Hot on the heels of the Riyadh workshop on Quality Infrastructure (QI), I attended the Expert Group Meeting (EGM) for the QI4SD Index, hosted at UNIDO headquarters in Vienna, Austria.
The objective of the workshop was to present the methodology of the QI4SD Index in detail to a group of around 40 experts from QI organisations including ISO, IEC, BIPM, OIML and many representatives from national standards bodies and other QI-related institutions, in order to receive feedback to improve the index in its next update.
The QI4SD Index is an index for measuring quality infrastructure and its contributions to SDGs, which I helped to build starting in 2020. It was launched in 2022, and has since gained quite some visibility and has been adopted by some countries as a national KPI for measuring progress. Subsequently, UNIDO would like to launch and updated version of the index in 2024. The workshop therefore feeds directly into improving the index.
The outcomes of the workshop were many pages of excellent feedback which we are now digesting. As usual in these workshops, some suggestions are more feasible than others, and we can only do so much in the update next year, but all feedback was extremely welcome.
We should begin working on the index update early in 2024.