Accra, Sept. 6, GNA - The Ghana Employers' Association (GEA) has begun a one-year project to sensitize its members to better enforce Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) measures at their workplaces to prevent accidents.
The project targets the building and civil engineering sector, manufacturing, shipping and ports, hotel and catering and agriculture to help prevent accidents and ensure that workers work under satisfactory and secured conditions.
Mrs. Rose Karikari Anang, Executive Director of the GEA, said at the first workshop for the target group on Wednesday that measures to prevent accidents and ensure healthy conditions were mostly not enforced by the employers leading to rampant accidents at some workplaces. She said this had become a worry for the association particularly, when they could have been easily be prevented if the employers voluntarily complied with the safety measures stipulated under the Labour and Factory Acts.
Mrs Karikari Anang said the GEA had come up with the Business Sector Advocacy and Challenge Account (BUSAC) Fund to ensure that the private sector ran better by removing all bottlenecks. The BUSAC project, which started three months ago, would last for 12 months and is being funded by international donors like Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), UK Department for International Development (DFID) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as part of their support to Ghana. Oxia Ghana Limited is the service provider for the project and would serve as a consulting firm to conduct studies, facilitate workshops and brainstorming sessions and come up with reports for advocacy.
Mrs Karikari Anang said the project would come up with an Audit Company's OSH Report to give guidelines on operations and develop instruments that would help bring the company to the levels stipulated under the laws.
Citing the Tema Shipyard disaster last year as an example, she noted that safety and health impacted on the economic development of an enterprise and the country at large. She said accidents led to loss of production and increased insurance premiums which negatively affected the economy.
Mr Samuel Nii Tettey, Occupational, Safety and Health Specialist of the GEA, said the Labour Act 2003 provided for the safety of workers at the workplace and it was the duty of the employer to ensure that workers were securely guarded from injury.
He said Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) must be provided at no cost to the worker in addition to good sanitary conditions, adequate drinking water and fire fighters, among other things. In default, an employer could be sentenced to three years' imprisonment or fined 25 million cedis.
Mr Charles Asante Bempong, Project Manager of the BUSAC Fund, said it is aimed to broaden the engagement of the private sector in policy formulation and implementation, remove bottlenecks and improve their image within the general public.
He said the project, which the GEA had titled "Building a Culture of Voluntary Compliance With OSH Standards at the Workplace" had five main components including conducting surveys of existing policies and practices and designing of voluntary compliance programme. "It is expected that at the end of the project, employers could better manage safety and health conditions and reduce cost through improved conditions at the workplace," he said.
