From left representative of Czech Republic, Chairman of the
Addressing Group, Mr. Ali Bakheet from Saud Arabia Director General of the UPU,
Ambassador Bishar Hussein, Representative of Tanzania Mrs. Rehema Makuburi, Director
Postal Affairs TCRA and China representative.
1. INTRODUCTION
On 1st
November 2013, the United Republic of Tanzania was awarded by the Universal
Postal Union (UPU) a recognition certificate for her contribution to the UPU
S42 Addressing Standard Template Development. The recognition ceremony was
organised during the conference of the Postal Operations Council at the capital
city of Switzerland
which is the seat of the Universal Postal Union which is a specialized agency
of the United Nations (UN) in matters related to postal communications. Besides
Tanzania (United Rep.), Belarus,
Belgium, China (People's Rep.) and Czech Republic
qualified for the award of recognition certificate.
Quality addressing
and postcode systems are essential to the socio-economic infrastructure and
development of a country. They also form the cornerstone of quality postal
services, facilitating business transactions and hence the country's economic
growth. Address networks are crucial to businesses’ ability to operate. Address
networks are infrastructures that facilitate the process of doing business and,
consequently, economic development.
2. S42 INTERNATIONAL ADDRESSING
STANDARD
The UPU standard provides a kind of dictionary
of the possible components of postal addresses, together with examples and
constraints on their use in a given country. The
S42 international addressing standard consists of:
- a set of
postal address components used in worldwide addresses;
- languages
for expressing address templates, i.e. formal descriptions of address
formatting rules;
- provides
country-specific address templates. A country defining its S42 template
provides precise information about its address elements and formatting
rules;
- creates
a library of templates that can be easily incorporated into computer
systems for managing addresses.
During the process of launching of template development, Tanzania contacted the S42 expert group at the
Universal Postal Union by submitting a sample data set, which consisted address
examples representing all the address formats recommended by the United Republic.
Each address in
the sample needed to be mapped into S42 elements reflecting their use in the
country. For example, mapping the address lines in different delivery methods
and explaining whether is a rural or urban address with indication of
thoroughfare type.
On the basis of a
mapped sample, the S42 expert group creates a template which is fed into a
computer program known as a tester. This program reassembles each address from
elements and checks the result against the submitted data. The test of the
template is positive when all addresses from the sample have been assembled
correctly.
At the end of the process, the Tanzania
delegation to the Addressing Group was involved in checking the following:
- that
all addresses in the sample data set are properly formatted;
- the
sample contains a sufficiently complete representation of formats
recommended by the United
Republic; and
- the
addresses are correctly mapped to S42 elements.
Following the procedure above, the Tanzania S42 standard was
approved in April 2013 and a ceremony was planned for 1st November
2013..
3.
RECOGNITION CEREMONY
The
Certificate of Recognition is granted when a country has achieved the
development
and maintenance of an agreed or accepted address template.The S42
recognition ceremony is normally designed to raise postal administrations’
awareness on the value of S42 and encourage them to join the S42 certification
program.
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