Strengthening the Compliance of the OIC Member States
to International Standards
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earnings. This is an example of the ways in which stricter standards abroad can, over the medium term,
generate gains for local industries, provided that appropriate supporting structures are in place.
Another important sector is agriculture, specifically horticultural exports. Standards have consistently
become stricter in the EU over recent years, but Senegal has succeeded in boosting exports in this
environment. As in the case of fish, stricter EU standards led to restructuring in the industry, and a
partial shift from smallholder production to large-scale integrated estate production. Overall, the effects
of rapid export growth in this environment have been strongly poverty reducing, an important insight in
an LDC like Senegal.
6.2.3.5 Policy Implications of Senegal’s Experience
Senegal’s experience with international harmonization of standards is potentially instructive for other
small developing countries among the OIC’s membership. First, the regional dimension is key:
development of quality infrastructure is resource intensive, and leveraging regional cooperation can be
one way of achieving critical scale to make key developments realistic. Of course, it is important that
regional partners be committed to international—not just regional—harmonization. Senegal has
demonstrated its own commitment in this regard, in a way that has clear implications for other small
countries at various development levels: in most cases, it will be beneficial for such economies to adopt
international standards because they rely heavily on international markets as sources of demand,
thereby making the export competitiveness rationale set out above particularly compelling.
A second implication of Senegal’s experience is the need to seek out appropriate development
partnerships to develop quality infrastructure. Senegal is by no means unique in lacking some key
aspects of quality infrastructure, and having to rely on interim solutions, such as the use of foreign
organizations at higher expense. Targeted technical assistance and capacity building, combined with a
regional approach, can help deal with these kinds of problems. However, there are indications that
major sources of development finance, such as the multilateral banks, may need further sensitization to
the importance of standards and harmonization as issues that go to the core of export competitiveness,
particularly in the era of GVCs.
The final policy lesson that can be drawn from this case study is that even a small, low income country
can adopt a modern approach to standardization, relying heavily on voluntary standards and using a
private law body as the core agency. This setup is an element of international best practice that finds an
echo in the Senegalese case. Of course, the rate at which standards are developed is necessarily slower
than would be the case in a larger, better resourced country—Senegal has just over 400 standards,
compared with 10,000 in Egypt, for example—but the general approach of relying heavily on