Safeguarding Our Future to Add Value
Coming off the heels of Saint Lucia receiving major awards for excellence in Tourism at the end of 2025 the Saint Lucia Bureau of Standards is not allowing the island to rest on its laurels.
On the 19th of January to keep true to our plan to ramping up our work programme the SLBS held a meeting with experts from a wide range of professionals from the Ministry of Tourism, Community Tourism, Ministry of Health, Environmental Health, Public Service and Ministry of Commerce, forming an initial stakeholder engagement for the advancement of a certification programme for food handling, spa and beauty & wellness.
The aim of this meeting is to brainstorm on charting a road map to enable a Certification system that allows our service providers such as caterers, spa owners, barbers, nail techs to add value to their work and product for both them and their customers.
This would be to create a seamless, collaborative effort amongst the relevant departments to serve and provide aid to our service providers in identifying methods and programmes that will allow certification methodologies to work for them and raise their market value and promote a healthier more sustainable method of operating businesses.
The objective is to progress and propel these industries into levels that can also take advantage of new technologies and methodologies that may be advantageous to business owners. As Ms. Prisca Stanislaus of the Community Tourism stated passionately about the need for such a collaboration “We cannot get the changes we want if we do not empower the people.”
The members of this committee hope to make steady progress in accomplishing their objectives as they had all been in previous meeting discussing these same methods and years later, we keep starting from scratch. The hope is under the direction of the Saint Lucia Bureau of Standards we may be more progressive. “We believe MSME’s are critical and so we must meet them where they are and elevate them. That way we can be selfless instead of selfish” said Ms. Agard from Public Service and Coalition of Services.
This will be the first in a series of meetings aimed at augmenting and enhancing these MSME’s as another meeting has already been planned for February.