The mission of the Authority is to promote quality principles and facilitate the use of standards to reduce technical barriers to trade and investment, ensure a sustainable Swazi economy and safeguard the nation's health, safety and environment. It is governed by a ten-member Council whose function is provide strategic and policy direction to the benefit of the Swazi people through an improved standard of living. Swaziland is a correspondent member of ISO and an affiliate member of the IEC. These memberships together with the country's obligations to the WTO TBT agreement are the responsibility of SWASA which thrives within the limits of its resources to ensure that they are adequately executed. The national standards body opened its doors on 2 April 2007 and currently employs sixteen people ten of whom are in the technical department.

The technical department of SWASA currently houses the Information Center; the Standards Development Unit; and the Testing and Laboratory Services Unit. the First two are fully functional according to the laid down ISO guides and the Testing Unit is functional albeit to a limited scope. SWASA has benefited from collaborating with other standards bodies within the SADC region as well as for the SADC/EU cooperation project. The immediate plan of the authority includes staff capacity building, national stakeholder awareness-raising and the identification, development and declaration of Swaziland National Standards (SZNS). SWASA is currently hosting six technical committees that have just concluded the interrogation of seven international management system standards that will become the first batch of SZNS. By the fourth quarter of 2009, SWASA will be offering some rudimentary advisory services to the economic operators of the Kingdom of Swaziland, based on these newly declared national standards. This will be with the hope of venturing into the provision of certification services, which will be more market-driven than commercial.

SWASA has formulated what is known as the SWASA-Consumer Information Interface (SCII) pronounced "SKI". This is a serial programme of meetings at which SWASA collects information to be used in guiding the direction of its standardisation activities and to identify key consumer individuals that will latch onto the ISO COPOLCO scheme.