OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH AND SAFETY CHALLENGES IN WORKPLACE IMPROVEMENT IN AFRICA

 Ehi Iden – President, OSHAfrica

Oluranti Samuel, Lagos State University

 Africa has been documented as the region with the highest youth population as almost 60% of Africa’s population is under the age of 25 years (1). This should be a benefit to Africa but a high number of this population are not in education, employment or training (NEET) and this has made it difficult to leverage on this strength for positive gains (2). In the midst of these challenges, a number of youth who are fortunate enough to find employment feel threatened in their workplaces due to high level of workplace risks without adequate safety procedures and absence of social safety net (3).

While Africa has been at the centre of several global conversations on Workplace Safety and Health improvement, these conversations have not yielded much results due to lack of actionable commitment from various stakeholders. Amongst a number of variables is the poor leadership commitment to Occupational Safety and Health at regional, country and enterprise levels across Africa. Several meetings have been held in Africa where several heads of states have discussed this retinue of issues yet nothing tangible has come out of these meetings. These include the WHO-ILO joint efforts on Occupational Health and Safety in Africa held in March 2001 in Harare Zimbabwe, the Ouagadougou Convention of all African leaders held in Burkina Faso in 2004 and the Review of Occupational Health and Safety in Africa held in Benin Republic in 2005 (4). The subsequent outcomes or success of these meetings are difficult to track. For these efforts to cumulate into realistic results, we need multi-layer commitment towards health and safety in Africa. This lack of commitment has adversely affected both the growth of the workplace health and safety profession and implementation of safe processes in African workplaces.

The African region is characterised by grossly inadequate or non-existent workplace health and safety legislation and regulations. There is only so much that can be done in without effective legislation. The 2019 OSHAfrica conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, highlighted this as a key limitation to workplace health and safety growth in Africa. OSHAfrica announced  its ongoing efforts to review all existing legislation with the hope of working with African Union for a One-Africa Workplace Health and Safety Protocol. This project was significantly slowed down by the COVID-19 Pandemic but efforts are  still on course with legislation of over 40 countries already reviewed.

The legislation in several African countries was found to be obsolete and ineffective for the protection of worker health and safety in this day and age. It might be necessary to amend these documents to make them relevant to modern day realities. We must bear in mind that these laws govern health and safety within each sovereign state and until they are amended, workers will continue to be harmed.

The launch of the African Confederation Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) in May 2019 in a region with inadequate legal frameworks for workplace health and safety governance and regulation is worrisome. This agreement enables, for example, a Nigerian to freely trade in Gabon or Zambia or a Kenyan to freely trade in Egypt  or Cameroon without a unified regional health and safety legislative framework. I think, we need to rethink this process.

It is also difficult to clearly understand what level of funding that health and safety attracts in Africa. We can clearly assume that it is grossly underfunded. This can be seen in the quality and outcomes of work done by agencies of government across many countries in Africa. The Abuja Declaration of 2001 mandated all African Heads of States to increase their national healthcare budget to 15% (5).   19 years later, only South Africa and Rwanda have met the demand. With the state of healthcare in many countries, one can assume that workplace health and safety continues to be underfunded in Africa. This underfunding has handicapped regulatory government agencies. Of note is the insufficient number of workplace health and safety inspectors across Africa, leading to poor inspections. In most countries, there are workplaces that have not been inspected for over five years, making it difficult to know what goes on in these workplaces. Other challenges include the inadequate inspector training and unavailable resources needed to do the inspections. These all need urgent improvement (7).

The implementation of safe processes across African workplaces is also hindered by there being insufficient institutions for health and safety training and standardization. Few institutions offer health and safety courses in Africa. Some Africans have managed to access education in the West at a very high cost which very few families or individuals can afford. As a result there are very few qualified Occupational Health and Safety Practitioners in Africa while many are learn on-the-job and this is not safe.

When you do not set a standard, everything you see will look like a standard. There is the clear need for the region to have defined standard training requirements. For example, what constitutes a standard First Aid Training? What constitutes a standard Risk Assessment Training? What are the standard contents that must be found in these training modules and how many learning hours should we consider adequate? We do not currently have this in Africa and people offer different training programmes, applying whatever standards as they deem fit. This contributes to the lack of coherence in workplace health and safety practice in Africa. There have been cases where training certificates are turned down or rejected in other countries because they were below standard. The question is, what is the standard? And what certificates should be issued? Training programs need to be well defined and standardized across the continent.  If we get this right, this will created an opportunity for institutions of learning to develop health and safety programs into existing faculties.

As already mentioned, across the continent occupational health and safety legislation is grossly inadequate and, in most instances, obsolete. Where scanty pieces of the law exist, enforcement is poor. Safety and Health Inspectors, mostly from Ministries of Labour, are responsible for enforcement but they are either too few in number or not properly trained on their roles, and this makes enforcement difficult. Many have qualifications that are not related to occupational safety and health but get little training in employment and are deficient in the knowledge and may not be able to conduct effective inspections. Therefore, enforcement suffers as a result of these inadequacies.

Poor research capabilities in Africa by African health and safety practitioners is yet another challenge. We need to scale up occupational health and safety research capabilities. While there are pockets where research is done, improvement is required and more articles need to be published in accredited, peer-reviewed journals.  Research helps to identify problems and provides evidence to support the development of interventions. Practitioners should be trained in research methods and on how to secure funding for research. With this, Africa will be able to develop capacity in new areas, identify health and safety challenges and provide solutions instead of waiting for experts from the West to do the research.

The National Institute of Occupational Health (NIOH) in South Africa, is an ILO and WHO collaborating centre in Africa. This is good but there is the urgent need to set up smaller research centres across all four sub-regions in Africa. I suggest that such sub-regional centres as being closer to the issues and could conduct research locally while the NIOH assumes the role of an African flagship occupational health research centre. Every research carried out from these 4 smaller centres are all fed into NIOH as a regional repository. Researchers able to find a single source of materials for Occupational Health and Safety Research in Africa will be a good idea.

While there are many challenges in occupational health and safety and with implementation of improvements in workplaces in Africa, these problems can be fixed if we approach them in a more structured manner with honesty and commitment from all stakeholders. When you look at these issues, they are not so complex, they are not above us all. We can fix them with mindful use of the available resources and expertise from across Africa

What will be the eventual outcomes if we all commit to fixing these challenges? At the very least, employees’ families will live with the assurance that their loved ones will work in safe conditions and return home at the end of the day. This will make African workplaces safe and healthy to work in, saving time, cost and improving productivity.

 References

1. Kariba, F. (2020) “The Burgeoning Africa Youth Population: potential or Challenge” Cities Alliancehttps://www.citiesalliance.org/newsroom/news/cities-alliance-news/%C2%A0burgeoning-africa-youth-population-potential-or-challenge%C2%A0

2. Faria, J. (2021) “Rate of young people not in education, employment of training (NEET in Africa from 2012 -2021” Statista  https://www.statista.com/statistics/1266094/youth-neet-rate-in-africa/

3. World Health Organisation. Protecting Workers’ Health 2017 Nov 30 https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/protecting-workers'-health (accessed 30 May 2022)

4. Theron, A. (2016). “Africa to prioritise health and safety as an economic development determinant”. ESI-Africa. https://www.esi-africa.com/features-analysis/africa-to-prioritise-health-and-safety-as-an-economic-development-determinant/

5. Olarere, N., Gatome-Munyua, A. (2020) “Public Financing for Health in Africa: 15% of an Elephant is not 15% of a Chicken”. African Renewal. https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/october-2020/public-financing-health-africa-when-15-elephant-not-15-chicken

6. Biegon, J. (2020) “19 years ago today, African countries vowed to spend 15% on health”. African Arguments. https://africanarguments.org/2020/04/19-years-africa-15-health-abuja-declaration/

7. Mashwama, N., Aigbavboa, C., Thwala, W. (2019). Occupational Health and Safety Challenges Among Small and Medium Sized Enterprise Contractors in South Africa. In: Goossens, R. (eds) Advances in Social and Occupational Ergonomics. AHFE 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 792. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94000-7_7