Safety and health at work: Hopes and challenges in development cooperation

The project "Improving safety and health at work through a Decent Work agenda" was developed to better address safety and health at work as a vital component of decent work and ran between 2010 and 2012. The brochure aims to raise awareness on occupational safety and health issues among the development cooperation community and provide information about the project. It also highlights some successes of the project that could be replicated in other countries.

Development cooperation consists in supporting the long term economic, social, political and environmental development of developing countries. Occupational safety and health (OSH) is often viewed as a small part of development cooperation, usually through the employment or social protection lens. But OSH issues deserve more attention, be it as a specific theme or mainstreamed into other areas of focus, so far as it contributes to strengthening the national development processes.

Occupational accidents and illnesses cannot be seen as an inevitable price to be paid in the course of a country’s development. Rather, creating a safe and healthy working environment will help prevent human suffering, exclusion and poverty, and will also benefit business and the national economy by increasing productivity, cost-savings and competitiveness. It will contribute to longer term economic, social, political and environmental development. Integrating OSH issues in the policy agenda, be it as a specific theme or mainstreamed into other areas of focus, will therefore serve various major objectives in development cooperation.

Guided by these considerations and the provisions of the Promotional Framework for Occupational Safety and Health Convention, 2006 (No. 187), the European Union and the ILO carried out a joint project on "Improving safety and health at work through a Decent Work Agenda" between 2010 and 2012. The project covered three regions through five target countries – Honduras, Malawi, the Republic of Moldova, Ukraine, and Zambia. It has shown interesting successes towards decent, safe and healthy workplaces for all.

The challenge today is that more transition and developing countries engage in similar initiatives so that the human and economic costs of occupational accidents and diseases do not delay their development.