Quality Assurance Update: Earning Your Continued Trust

Trust is fundamental to the Lighting Global Quality Assurance Program, which aims to help purchasers and other market actors identify products that will meet or exceed consumers’ expectations for quality. We are writing to update you on what we are doing to earn your continued trust.
We recently learned that a fake Lighting Global verification letter was submitted to a product procurement program in Africa. The product in question had never been submitted for testing through Lighting Global Quality Assurance, meaning that the verification letter was forged. We discovered that the verification letter was fake when the person who received it could not find the product listed on the Products page of the Lighting Global website. We are taking action against the perpetrator in this case and establishing a strategy to deter similar cases of fraud going forward. Please remember that you can always check the status of a quality-verified product on www.lightingglobal.org, where you can download the product’s specification sheet (or book) and its verification letter. If you need help verifying a product’s status, please contact us.
Over the past 24 months, we carried out market check testing (MCT) of 13 quality-verified products. Primary check testing identified potential problems with 7 of these 13 products. Of these seven products, three maintained their quality-verified status after targeted re-testing or correction to consumer-facing information; the other four were removed from the list. In addition, we carried out visual inspections of 55 quality-verified products in key African markets. Nearly three-quarters of these products were found to meet the consumer-facing information requirements of the Lighting Global Quality Standards. Manufacturers had to make adjustments to consumer-facing information for the remaining products to bring them into compliance with the Quality Standards. These tests and visual inspections serve as a further safeguard beyond initial qualification testing and are part of our commitment to ensuring quality-verified products continue to meet expectations after market introduction. If you have an interest in verifying the performance of specific models, please contact us to discuss partnership opportunities.
We revised the Conditional Pass and Market Check Testing policies to clarify procedures for manufacturers when our evaluation of a product finds that it does not meet the Quality Standards. A product that has completed initial qualification testing may be granted a conditional pass; if the manufacturer takes the necessary corrective actions, the product will become quality verified. Similarly, when a product fails a market check test, the manufacturer may opt to do follow-up testing or take other prescribed actions to avoid having the product delisted. We have revised both policies to clarify the steps manufacturers must take and by when and to ensure the policies are applied fairly and effectively. Overall, these revisions make the program more predictable and give users of the QA framework greater confidence that the products listed on the Products page will perform as expected. For more on product testing history, our testing processes, and policies, visit us on the web.
Please join us for the Global Off-Grid Solar Forum and Expo, January 22-24 in Hong Kong, where we will be involved in a number of sessions related to quality assurance, including Government’s Role in Promoting Off-Grid Solar Markets, Technical Advances in the Off-Grid Sector, Quality Assurance for Off-Grid Energy Systems, Lighting Global Quality Assurance Stakeholder Meeting, and more.