On 6-7 August 2018, the ILO Country Office for Sri Lanka and the Maldives in association with the Department of Labour conducted a training workshop on occupational safety and health (OSH) in Wadduwa for twenty six Labour Officers (14 women and 12 men) from District Labour Offices in Avisawella, Ambalangoda, Colombo, Elpitiya, Kalutara, Maharagama, Matara, Matugama, Morawaka and Panadura. The training aimed at providing the labour officers with practical knowledge to improve OSH so that they can assist small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in preventing occupational accidents and enhancing productivity. Dr Tsuyoshi Kawakami, ILO’s Senior Specialist on OSH in New Delhi and Dr Wajira Palipane, Deputy Commissioner of Labour (Occupational Health) were the trainers.

The training applied ILO’s participatory, action-oriented training methodology known as WISE (Work Improvements in Small Enterprises). At the very beginning of the training, the participants visited a furniture factory (Photo 1) and a garment factory (Photo 2) and walked around the production floor with the application of the WISE action-checklist (Photos 3 and 4) to find good OSH solutions and issues for improvement. After coming back from the initial factory visits, six technical sessions (materials handling, workstations, machine safety, work environments, welfare facilities and work organization, and implementation of improvements) were carried out. The trainers used a number of photographs, and illustrations of low-cost OSH improvements, as visual aids.

Learning from practical OSH improvement examples, the participating Labour Officers discussed how to assist the improvement of the two factories. At the end of the training, they successfully developed practical proposals for recommendation. They said that the WISE training was very practical and different from the conventional lecture and note-taking style. It was apparent that the training increased their confidence of providing better labour inspection and advisory services for improving OSH in SMEs. The ILO and Department of Labour plan to continue this style of OSH training for more Labour Officers in other parts of Sri Lanka.