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This study aims to dissect the multifaceted impact of ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation, specifically within civil engineering testing and calibration laboratories. To achieve this, it intends to explore several key objectives: identifying the prominent benefits of accreditation to laboratory performance, understanding the advantages conferred through participation in proficiency testing schemes, assessing the role of accreditation in enhancing laboratory competitiveness, examining the primary challenges encountered during the accreditation process, investigating any discernible adverse effects of accreditation on laboratory performance and evaluating whether the financial cost of accreditation justifies the resultant profitability.

This study employs a qualitative approach through semi-structured interviews with 23 industry professionals—including technical managers, quality managers, external auditors and clients. Thematic analysis, guided by Braun and Clarke’s six-stage paradigm, was utilized to interpret the data, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the accreditation’s impact.

Findings reveal that accreditation significantly enhances operational processes, fosters quality awareness and facilitates continuous improvement, contributing to greater client satisfaction. In addition, standardized operations and rigorous quality controls further result in enhanced performance metrics, such as staff capability and measurement accuracy. However, the study also uncovers the challenges of accreditation, including high resource costs and bureaucratic hurdles that can inhibit innovation and slow routine operations. Importantly, the research underscores that the impact of accreditation on profitability is not universal, but contingent upon various factors like sector-specific regulations and market demand. The study also highlights sector-specific variations in the role of accreditation as a marketing tool and differing perceptions of its value among clients. It further emphasizes the psychological stress of high-stakes evaluations during audits.

This study represents the first in-depth investigation into the impact of ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation on civil engineering testing and calibration laboratories, directly contributing to the enhancement of their quality and operational standards. Providing actionable insights for laboratories, it underscores the importance of weighing accreditation costs and benefits and the necessity for a tailored approach to the unique market and regulatory landscapes they operate in.

The current wave of decreasing electricity supply to meet the immediate demand of the populace is influencing not only economic growth but also the industrial productivity of the ECOWAS sub-region. In this context, this paper investigates the long-run and causal relationships between electricity consumption and industrial output in selected ECOWAS countries over the period 1971–2017.

The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bound testing approach is employed to determine the existence of relationships among the variables. The causal nexus between electricity consumption and industrial output is examined using both the Toda-Yamamoto causality test and the bootstrap-corrected causality technique.

The long run results indicated that increasing electricity supply enhances industrial output only in Benin, Cote d'Ivoire, Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. Furthermore, the causality test results confirmed the presence of all four hypotheses in this study, but the two causality tests agree, particularly in the evidence of growth and neutrality hypotheses. In the cases of Benin, Burkina Faso, Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, a unilateral causality running from electricity consumption to industrial output is found. However, no evidence of causality between electricity consumption and industrial production has been confirmed in Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea Bissau, Liberia and Niger.

The relevant energy stakeholders in the subregion need to reprioritize their policy framework to focus more on the electricity sector of their economies since electricity consumption is identified as an important driver of industrial growth in the West African countries.

This is the first study to provide a comparative and country-specific investigation of the nexus between electricity consumption and industrial output in Africa, particularly in the West African region.