Wednesday, August 12, 2020

COVID-19, DISRUPTION ON EDUCATION AND SCHOOLS REOPENING APPREHENSION

I really think it is important to hear what various people are saying about reopening of schools and how ILO feels education has been adversely disrupted by COVID-19. 

According to a recent report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) says COVID-19 has disrupted education of more than 70% of youths and "digital divides" between regions has also made matters worse in terms of virtual learning opportunities. 

In that same report by ILO, “up to 65% of youths in high income countries were taught in virtual classes with video lectures while only 18% in low income countries were able to keep studying online during the period of COVID-19”. Another report from Harvard says “online classes resulted in viral absenteeism and virtual dropouts among students within this period, in Boston Massachusetts, 20% of students did not log into class all through the month of May, 2020”. Now that we have seen the downside of virtual learning among younger students owning to a number of reasons, should we still leave the schools closed? Does anyone really know how long the COVID-19 will be here for? Has it come to stay or it will fade away soon? If it has come to stay, does that mean our children will never return to schools? Let's keep in mind, there is nothing as zero risks, we only can lower the risks. 

In as much as most people like us advocate for government to wait a little more before reopening schools, are we able to also think of the cost of ignorance that comes with our children not able to return to school. We must also realize reopening of schools will allow most parents to return to work. 

There are devastating cost of keeping children out of school, the list is just endless. This is understood but we must also benchmark these costs with the cost of sending children back to schools in this state of COVID-19 scare. The level of apprehension is high, we need to start opening conversations and consultations along these lines and get parents properly engaged. 

Lately, I have also been reading many reports that have alluded to the fact that COVID-19 infection has been found to be growing among children. Having this in mind and looking at poor compliance to the COVID-19 response guidelines and protocols among adult population, I get worried how much of compliance we may expect from children in schools. Reopening of schools is a global discussion that is beginning to have so many divides, we have seen countries that were in a rush to reopen schools and how they hurriedly shut down those schools after the surge in the rate of infection. We have seen this happen in countries like Denmark, Norway, South Africa and others. 

There is the need to keep in mind a new sets of risks are being introduced into schools as they open, we have varied degree of new chemicals now being used for deep cleaning in this phase of COVID-19. These chemicals are not only harmful and exposing the janitors to heightened level of risks, they are also harmful to school children mostly the ones with underlying respiratory condition and other children who may mistake chemicals in non-labelled canisters as water. Have we been adequately trained in schools on safe chemicals handling? How much of risk communication have we had with both school owners, students, parents and cleaners along these lines? Have we been able to request from parents return-to-school health assessment forms where questions of the state of health of each child should be clearly answered with focus on underlying health conditions as asthma and other respiratory diseases? 

In as much as we do not want these children to remain at home, we must carefully and collectively consider what works for us as a people and as a country, it is not a one-style-fits-all approach. The likely death of any school child as a result of school acquired COVID-19 infection will be a huge agony for any parent and this is the point no one wants to get to. The right to education has been classified as a part of fundamental human right of every child in any country according to UNICEF but it is also important to understand no child in anywhere in the world should be made to access education at the expense of his or her life. 

This seems a very difficult conversation for us all and the choices to make are all there but we must by all means assess the prevalent risks associated with each of the choice in the interest of both the school child and their parents.

These are my personal opinions as put together in this write up supported with a number of reports as referred. We will to hear your views, kindly leave a comment for us here. 

ehi@ohsm.com.ng 

Youth and COVID-19: COVID-19 disrupts education of more than 70 per cent of youth 



Friday, August 7, 2020

AFRICAN OSH AND LABOUR INSPECTORS NETWORK: A STRATEGIC INITIATIVE OF OSHAFRICA

 

This is a new strategic project initiated by OSHAfrica to cater for the gap in OSH and Labour Inspection across Africa. This part of Workplace Health and Safety in Africa currently is difficult to understand and organise because of the different standards being used across the 54 countries and we felt the need to look into the issues with the hope of bringing all actors together for sharing of experiences and learning together.

When we refer to the ILO Labour Inspection Convention 81 of 1947 and Convention 155 of 1981 which virtually all African countries have signed and ratified, it becomes obvious how committed we should be in developing our OSH and Labour Inspection standard. Workplace inspection processes ensure organisations implement the practices of decent and safe workplaces especially concerning the protection guaranteed to the workers by social laws and regulations. There is also a requirement for the inspectors to report the gaps or defects within these laws and processes to government for further reviews and implementation.

When we look at the role of OSH and Labour Inspection from this perspective, you will realize they are not just there to inspect safe workplace practices, they are also very important with the feedback needed to strengthen existing OSH and Labour legislation. Having this in mind, we should therefore see this arm of workplace health and safety inspection as a very important component of our work without which the system may never be complete.

In reviewing the place of OSH and Labour Inspection in Africa, we realized there were three critical issues common among all actors across all countries, they are:

Under staffing

 Under funding

Inadequacies in training

Two of those factors are not within our immediate control, though we are able to advice different government on improved staffing and better funding. We realized we are able to immediately bring these inspectors together in one common platform where they can share experiences on good practices and further training which OSHAfrica and other partners can make available to them.

In trying to fully understand the level of under staffing that exists within this unit in Africa, we tried looking at the current staffing levels across 5 African countries and below were the outcomes.

Nigeria: This country has over 200 million people in population (https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/nigeria-population/), there were only less than 350 inspectors until 2019 when the new employment brought the figures to 750 inspectors. This was according to our discussions with the Director of Occupational Safety and Health of the Ministry of Labour and Employment. We see this figure as still grossly inadequate for the population.

Ghana: This country’s 2020 population is estimated at 31, 072,940 people according to United Nations data (https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ghana-population/) but there exists only 50 inspectors currently and waiting for 6 more to be recruited.

Egypt: With an estimated 102 million population (https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/egypt-population/) has 520 inspectors currently.

Zambia: With a population of 18.3 million people https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/zambia-population/) currently has only 13 inspectors with a plan in place to recruit an additional of 13 more inspectors.

South Africa: With a population of 59 million people, (https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/south-africa-population/) there are 170 inspectors. From all indications, this seems to be the only country where we have a reasonable number of inspector per population. These information were gathered from the interaction we had with the Directors of Occupational Safety and Health and in some cases with the Factory Inspectors in each of these 5 countries.

In OSHAfrica, we already have functional 3 Scientific Committees and we realised the only way we can create an intervention in this arm of workplace health and safety improvement will be to create an entirely new strategic forum that will bring together all OSH and Labour Inspectors. We have succeeded in doing this, we currently have over 170 of such inspectors from over 18 African countries. Western, Southern, Eastern African sub regions are already well represented, we are currently pushing Northern and Central African regional inclusion, once we achieve  this in the next few weeks, we will have the formal launch of African OSH and Labour Inspectors Network.

The whole aim is to be able to offer these inspectors the specific training they need to function rightly, capacity building and competency improvement is a key area we want to help address. We realised most of these people were just employed without any form or requisite training, in some cases where they had training, they were grossly insufficient. We feel the right kind of improvement expected in workplaces may never happen until we commence the intended training and retraining programs focused on OSH and Labour Inspection skills improvement. All existing scientific committees of OSHAfrica will offer support to the new network in line with their mandate. Example is the OSH Legislation and Policy Improvement scientific committee bringing together their expertise in helping to work with member countries in strengthening their labour legislation. The committee on Education and Competency Improvement offering training support while the committee on Research, Data and Publication will also be here in helping them put data together for reporting.

We should be able to harmonize OSH and Labour Inspection across Africa through this intervention and we will keep updating the needed skills of the inspectors. Currently they are all together in Telegram as a group and are able to ask questions in areas they are not so clear about.  As a Nigerian inspector, you do not need to repeat the mistake that an inspector in Congo had already made, you just throw the issues you have into the group for discussion and at the end of the day, and you have a solution. This is the whole idea.

We will be extending our discussions to International Association of Labour Inspectors (IALI), International Labour Organisation (ILO), German Social Accident Insurance (DGUV), European Network Education and Training in Occupational Safety and Health (ENETOSH) and others partners for support in developing the capacity of African OSH and Labour Inspectors.

Nyambari, S. T. (2005). Labour Inspection in Africa- Promoting Workers Right, Labour Education, ILO https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@ed_protect/@protrav/@safework/documents/publication/wcms_108666.pdf

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ghana-population/#:~:text=The%20current%20population%20of%20Ghana,year%20according%20to%20UN%20data.

https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:51:0::NO:51:P51_CONTENT_REPOSITORY_ID:2543058:NO

https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C081

https://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:12100:0::NO::P12100_ILO_CODE:C155

https://www.ilo.org/global/standards/subjects-covered-by-international-labour-standards/social-policy/lang--en/index.htm

https://www.ilo.org/jobspact/policy/WCMS_DOC_GJP_ARE_DLG_EN/lang--en/index.htm.