CAN THO CITY, Viet Nam (ILO online) - In the late afternoon, farmers in the village of Thoi Hoa Hamlet in the south of the country saw their neighbours gathering at Ms. Thu Van's house to discuss something. They were holding documents, making notes, and carefully looking around the house and rice fields.
Before long these neighbours' houses and fields looked nicer. Passageways were repaired, tools rearranged. There were new bathrooms and toilets, stronger electricity poles, neatly covered power lines, and guards installed over the moving processing machine parts. The farmers were impressed.
The improvements were the product of the ILO's Work Improvement for Neighbourhood Development (WIND) scheme. Ms. Van is one of 20 farmers in Xuan Thang Commune, Co Do District who became a farmer WIND volunteer after completing a four-day training workshop run by the Can Tho City Provincial Supporting Committee (PSC).
Using her new knowledge Ms. Van started to make simple improvements in her house and workplace, using only local materials and resources. One measure - impressive in its simplicity - is a string for turning on and off the electrical switch of the water pump, to avoid direct contact.
"Working in the bathroom or kitchen our hands and fingers get wet," she says. "Touching the electricity switch with wet fingers may cause an electrical shock so I put the switch up high and attached a string to avoid contact."
Simple but effective improvements like this are the sort of changes she is now introducing to her farmer neighbours, through mini-WIND workshops. Mini-WIND is a scaled-down version of the WIND programme, targeting five to ten farmers. It offers one technical session, rather than the five sessions in the full WIND programme, namely, information on materials storage and handling, work station design, safe use of electricity and machines, working environment and management of chemicals, welfare facilities and work organization.
Ms. Van ran ten mini-WIND workshops for ten farmers in three months. All the farmers found the WIND programme very practical and easy to understand, helping them make improvements using locally available, low-cost materials and their own skills.
At present 71 farmer WIND volunteers like Ms. Van are playing active roles in grassroots agricultural occupational safety and health in the four target provinces/cities. So far around 600 farmers have benefited from the project, each one drawing up an action plan and making between five and ten improvements to their homes and farms. In 2005, more than 4,000 improvements were implemented by local farmers in four project provinces. Further expansion of such OSH activities to the whole country has been proposed by the government.
Ms. Rose Marie Greve, Director of the ILO Hanoi Office is glad to see such simple, low-cost and effective improvements being made by the farmers: "There are two important keys to the success of the project, the policy-level support to the project activities from the government and having good tools like WIND at the grassroots level."
The Government of Viet Nam understands the importance of this issue and made agriculture the main focus for their National Weeks on Occupational Safety and Health, Fire and Explosion Prevention and Fighting in 2002 and 2003. The Government has also issued Instruction No. 20 to enhance the management and guidance on occupational safety and health in agriculture. The Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs plans to carry out a feasibility study on the ratification of the ILO Convention on Occupational Safety and Health in Agriculture (No. 184).
The project is implemented by the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs in collaboration with the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Viet Nam Farmers' Association and Viet Nam Women's Union in the selected four provinces/cities: Ha Nam, Nghe An, Can Tho and Hau Giang.
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