Health Impact of Occupational Risks in the Informal Sector in ZimbabweChapter 1Introduction |
This report presents work carried out by Dr Rene Loewenson through the Training and Research Support Centre (TARSC) with a number of important inputs that should be acknowledged at the inception:
The important and competent contribution of all these parties to the work is gratefully acknowledged. |
Assessment of the health impact of occupational risks is important for social recognition of these occupational risks, to plan and facilitate adequate interventions for their prevention and to adequately manage the health burdens they cause. The International Labour Organisation and World Health Organisation are compiling information on the global health burden due to occupational risks. At a recent WHO/ILO meeting on this (Geneva, July 1997) it was raised that non wage or informal sector employment merits further attention given the fact that information on this sector is limited and poorly quantified.
Routine health monitoring and compensation systems indicate that the reported annual injury rates for wage workers in the SADC region range widely from 0.35 to 49.42 injuries per 1000 workers, with a median of 6.26 injuries / 1000 workers. For other African countries the range is 2.83-84.33 injuries / 1000 workers, and the median is 13.4 injuries/ 1 000 workers. The data further indicate that the reported occupational fatality rate in the SADC region ranges from 0.85 to 21.6 fatalities / 100 000 workers, with a median fatality rate of 14.02 fatalities / 100 000 workers. For other African countries the range is 0.84-87.50 fatalities / 100 000 workers, and the median is 10.38 fatalities / 100 000 workers.
As fully discussed in another text (Loewenson 1997) the gaps in reported data are more extensive than the data provided. To make a more accurate estimate of the health impact of occupational risk, such error would need to be identified and quantified so that revised estimates can be made taking it into account. The underestimation of occupational disease and disease related fatality is probably one of the most serious sources of bias in the currently reported data. WHO (1997) estimate a global burden of 1 060 000 occupational diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa (See Table 12). Using the disease rates found in Zimbabwe(Endnote 1), the rate of 14.49 diseases / 100 000 workers would translate to 22 460 diseases annually, or 2% of the WHO estimate. This means that the rates currently reported underestimate the real rates 50-fold(Endnote 2).
A further important source of error is in the coverage of reporting systems. The compensation systems in Africa do not cover all sectors of employment. In general they do cover manufacturing and construction, but do not all cover agriculture, public sector and mining employment, which may have separate occupational health and injury management and compensation systems. Peasant farming, domestic and urban informal sector employment is not covered in any of the reporting systems for which data is available. This report and the survey results it contains cover this sector of employment. In fact, the 'informal sector' is poorly defined, and is often defined by exclusion, after removing those in registered workplaces in wage or contractual employment. It is usually taken to include small enterprises, usually with less than 10 employees, unregistered in terms of company law, often without formal contracts of employment and often in forms of self employment. It is sometimes termed the non wage sector, and although wages may in fact be paid these are often unregulated. In this report the informal sector is taken to include all the above meanings.
The International Labour Organisation has defined the `informal sector' as follows:
"The term "informal sector" ... will refer to very small-scale units producing and distributing goods and services, and consisting largely of independent, self-employed producers in urban areas of developing countries, some of whom also employ family labour and/or a few hired workers or apprentices; which operate with very little capital, or none at all; which utilise a low level of technology and skills; which therefore operate at a low level of productivity; and which generally provide very low irregular incomes and highly unstable employment to those who work in it. They are informal in the sense that they are for the most part unregulated and unrecorded in official statistics; they tend to have little or no access to organised markets, to formal credit institutions, to formal education and training institutions or to many public services and amenities; they are not recognised, supported or regulated by the government; they are often compelled by circumstances to operate outside the framework of the law, and even where they are registered and respect certain aspects of the law they are almost invariably beyond the pale of social protection, labour legislation and protective measures at the work place. Informal sector producers and workers are generally unorganised ... and in most cases beyond the scope of action of trade unions and employers' organisations ... [And] ... they generally live and work in appalling, often dangerous and unhealthy conditions, even without basic sanitary facilities, in the shanty towns of urban areas. (ILO Dilemma 1991 in Mhone 1996)
Mhone (1996) comments that the informal sector should rather be characterised in neutral terms, such as `micro-enterprises', or `small-scale enterprises'. A definition used in the survey is given in Section 3.1 on the survey methods.
The ILO has noted that the persistence of the informal sector is due to the inability of the other sectors of the economy - agriculture or other rural activities on the one hand and modern industry and services on the other - to provide adequate incomes or employment to a rapidly growing labour force (ILO 1991 in Mhone 1996). Mhone (1996) notes that the evolution of the informal sector in Southern Africa is primarily a consequence of the inability of the economies of the sub-region to generate adequate productive employment opportunities in the informal sector in the face of increasing population and urbanisation. "The question arises, then, as to whether the informal sector activities developing under these dire economic conditions meaningfully contribute to productive employment and value-added in the economy as a whole; or whether the resulting activities represent survival mechanisms of last resort that are unproductive in the economic sense" (Mhone 1996). He notes that a substantial proportion of informal sector activities particularly in the larger countries such as Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique represents gross underemployment of labour and other resources, as a result of:
The Government of Zimbabwe ZIMPREST (1997) notes for example that medium and small enterprises (MSEs) can be roughly divided into three broad groups. The first group, the largest, accounts for 70% of employees, has a very low annual profit of Z$1 000; very low start-up capital, employs an average of one to two persons engaged mainly in grass, cane and bamboo processing, beer brewing, knitting, crocheting and vending farm products and garments. It includes the bulk of the under-employed whose enterprises are a temporary income-generating safety net. The second group of MSEs, about 20% of employment in MSEs, has a moderate annual profit ranging between Z$10 000 and Z$16 000; start up capital of over Z$2 000, and is in construction, retail trade, grocery and welding. The third group accounts for about 10% of total MSE employment, has a high average annual profit of about Z$132 000; start up capital of about Z$10 000; employs over 6 people; with core activities including printing, chemicals, bottle stores, flour mills, general trade, retail hardware and garments, auto works and other repairs. The growth of the latter two groups depends on the growth of demand for its output. An estimated two-thirds of MSE operators make less profit than the minimum wage for domestic workers and 88% of them make profits below the average earnings of formal sector employees. MSEs face many constraints on both the demand and supply sides, namely: Inadequate demand, shortage of finance, problems of stock and raw materials, lack of appropriate tools, inadequate training, absence of regulations and representative organisations to reflect and defend the interests of MSE operators.
There is a total labour force in Africa of approximately 235 million in 1990(Endnote 3). The share of this labour force in wage employment is relatively small. In selected African countries shown in Table 1.1 below it ranges from 0.6% to 51.1%, with a majority of countries having less than 10% of labour in wage labour. For the SADC countries, the share of labour in wage labour is higher and averages at about 20%. The data indicates that the greater share of working people are in the informal sector and thus not covered by formal systems for monitoring exposures, injury or illness.
In Zimbabwe, for example, the insured population covered by the reporting system covers 22% of all economically active / working people. The National Labour market survey (Govt of Zimbabwe CSO 1995) found that 34.6% of people are in formal sector / wage employment, indicating that a further 12.6% of people (or 667 300) are employed but not covered by the current reporting system. This 'non covered' group covers civil servants, domestic workers, and undeclared wage employees, mainly in small enterprises. Five percent (5%) of people are noted to be unemployed, while the balance (60%) are self employed or unpaid family workers.
Zimbabwe has a higher level of formal sector employment, and provides greater insured coverage of wage employees through a more developed national social security scheme than many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
TABLE 1.1: WAGE LABOUR AS A PERCENT OF TOTAL LABOUR IN SELECTED AFRICAN COUNTRIES
| COUNTRY | TOTAL LABOUR | WAGE LABOUR | % |
| Benin | 2 833 000 | 80 800 | 2.8 |
| Botswana | 624 000 | 169 500 | 27.2 |
| Burundi | 3 611 000 | 132 000 | 3.7 |
| Cote d'Ivoire | 5 920 000 | 415 500 | 7.0 |
| Kenya | 14 417 000 | 1 359 000 | 9.4 |
| Mauritius | 531 000 | 273 100 | 51.4 |
| Niger | 4 709 000 | 26 000 | 0.6 |
| Nigeria | 35 943 000 | 3 129 000 | 8.7 |
| Sierra Leone | 1 674 000 | 70 200 | 4.2 |
| Tanzania | 17 029 000 | 711 800 | 4.2 |
| Togo | 1 793 000 | 63 900 | 3.6 |
| Zambia | 3 761 000 | 359 600 | 9.6 |
| Zimbabwe | 5 296 000 | 1 039 400 | 19.6 |
| Source: ILO World Employment Programme 1992 | |||
Hence if the Zimbabwean data refers to 64% of wage employees, and 22% of all economically active people, the rates are likely to be lower in other countries. If formal/ wage employment covers about 10% of economically active people, two thirds or less of this group will be covered by formal notification systems, making the reported data about 6.4% of the total pattern of injury and fatality, if risks are uniform across groups. In the SADC region, where formal sector employment is about 20% of total employment and thus reported injury 12.8% of the total, the reported level of injury and fatality of approximately 300 000 can be extrapolated to a real level of 23 million injuries. Such a simple extrapolation should obviously be done with great caution as the sectors cover different areas of production and thus significantly different risks.
The most significant share of non-wage labour is in agriculture, with about 75% of labour in this sector. There are some 'outliers' - Mauritius at 19% due to high levels of industrial employment, Zambia at 38%, Lesotho at 23% due to the high level of migrant mine employment. Within this, less than 10% is in formal, wage agriculture, the vast proportion in smallholder, peasant farming. Other non wage groups not covered include the urban informal and small enterprise sector. In this sector there has been a growth of activity related to trading, processing and distribution of domestic goods such as soap, candles, furniture, buckets etc; woodworking, metal working, vehicle repair, construction and tailoring. Some informal sector production takes place in 'home based' enterprises with exposure spilling into residential communities.
In Zimbabwe, in 1993 there were about 942 000 MSEs enterprises (GoZ 1997). According to the 1986/87 Labour Force Survey, (CSO, 1986/87) 73% of all participants in the informal sector (excluding these in peri-urban market gardening) were engaged in retail services including wholesale, restaurant and general service activities. The sectoral distribution of small and microenterprises found in 1991 is shown in Table 2.1 below. The more comprehensive Gemini Study (1991) which made a nationwide sample survey of micro and small-scale enterprises in Zimbabwe, including sample rural and urban areas and both home based and outside home operations indicated that micro and small scale enterprises employ about 27% of all adult people in Zimbabwe. The survey revealed that contrary to the informal sector being dominated by trading-type activities, indeed the reverse is true; 70% of all informal sector activities fall in the manufacturing category, while about 23% can be classified as traders. Only 3% are in the service sectors. The Gemini study found that more than 75% of the sector are home based enterprises. Women represent 71% of all heads of small enterprise businesses and account for about 57% of employment in the sector (GoZ 1997).
Table 1.2: Sectoral distribution of Micro and Small Enterprises in Zimbabwe 1991 (in percentages)
| SECTOR | URBAN AREAS | RURAL AREAS | TOTAL |
| Food, beverage, tobacco, textile
Leather production Wood and wood processing Paper, printing and publishing Chemical and Plastics Non-metallic mineral processing Fabricated metal and production Other manufacturing TOTAL MANUFACTURING |
0.5 54.6 3.2 0.1 0.1 0.3 1.5 4.4 64.6 |
10.4 23.3 28.2 * 0.1 5.8 2.5 1.7 72.1 |
7.2 33.3 20.2 * 0.1 4.0 2.2 2.6 69.7 |
| Construction | 1.4 | 5.4 | 4.1 |
| Wholesale trade
Retail Trade Restaurants, hotels and bars TOTAL TRADE |
0.1 28.1 0.6 28.8 |
0.1 19.0 0.6 19.7 |
0.1 21.9 0.6 22.6 |
| Transport | 0.5 | * | * |
| Finance, real estate, business
Services |
0.1 4.6 |
* 2.8 |
* 3.4 |
| TOTAL ALL ENTERPRISES | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
Source: Gemini Survey, USAID 1991
Vegetable vending (urban) [no image]
Vegetable vending (rural):
Cooking and vending maize (urban):
Vending clothes (urban) [no image]
Newspaper vending (rural):
Informal sector urban market [no image]
Informal sector rural market [no image]
Transporting hardware (urban) [no image]
Transporting goods (urban) [no image]
Tailoring (urban) [no image]
Furniture repair (urban) [no image]
Repair of household goods (urban) [no image]
Stone crafting (peri-urban) [no image]
Farming (rural) [no image]
Trade in building materials (urban) [no image]
Woodworking (peri-urban) [no image]
Vehicle Repair (urban) [no image]
Metalworking (urban) [no image]
Endnote 1:
That is 172 diseases annually out of a working population of 1 186 649 or a
rate of 14.49 diseases /100 000 workers
Endnote 2:
The WHO estimates have been calculated by extrapolating Finish and Chinese age specific disease rates to exposed populations in African countries.
Endnote 3:
Source: Human Development Report UNDP 1990. This varies from the estimate of 155 million in WHO (1977), possibly because it includes all working people.
| [ Table of contents ] | [ List of papers ] |