Occupational Health and Safety Culture in Africa

The world of work has undergone many changes over the last decades, affecting both the health of workers and the environment. In developing countries, the introduction of new technologies and materials can lead to new epidemics of occupational and work-related diseases and injuries. At the same time, traditional occupational hazards, such as exposure to high dust and noise levels, are not effectively addressed. This results in a double burden of occupational injury and disease, as is evident in the African Region. Hence, a concerted effort for the development and application of occupational health and safety (OHS) policy and management systems is imperative.     OHS culture is a term used to describe the way in which OHS are managed in the workplace, and often reflects the attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and values that employees share in relation to health and safety.     When incidents occur in the workplace it is important to understand what factors (human, technical, organisational) may have contributed to the outcome in order to avoid similar incidents in the future. Through developing an understanding of why and how incidents occur, appropriate methods for incident prevention can be developed. In the past, attempts to improve workplace safety or control workplace risks have focussed on technical aspects (i.e. design of safer systems) and on the direct influence of human behaviour (i.e. operator error). However, a number of disasters have brought attention to the impact of organisational factors (i.e. policies and procedures) on the outcome of safety performance, with numerous inquiries identifying safety culture as having a definitive impact on the outcome of the disaster or workplace incident.    This presentation will give an overview of OHS culture in Africa, with a special focus on experiences from the Southern Africa region.