Evaluation of occupational health and safety in construction projects in Kampala, Uganda

Abstract

The building construction industry is faced with a lot of health and safety threats as a result of physical and manual site activities which make workers prone to work-related diseases, accidents, injuries and illnesses. In Uganda, laws and regulations have been enacted for example The Occupational Safety and Health Act (2006) but construction sites are still experiencing a high number of OSH incidents. This indicates that sites do not follow strict health and safety practices which means limited or no monitoring of work-related incidents hence continuous exposure of workers to occupational hazards. This implies that such occupational fatalities, injuries, diseases and illnesses will continue to occur on construction sites. This research represents the evaluation of occupational health and safety in construction projects in Kampala. The study mainly focused on building projects in Kampala central and questionnaires, interviews and observations were used to collect data. The data collected was analyzed and summarized using Microsoft Excel. Pie-charts and tables were used to represent the results. The research discovered that most respondents were male aged 20 to 30 years and majority didn’t have a degree as the highest level of education attained. It revealed that only (31%) of the respondents were not aware of policies and legislations that are in place. Only (12%) of respondents were trained daily on health and safety by their organizations and (56%) of accidents on sites were never recorded. The study also revealed that (44%) of the health and safety officers do not conduct investigations on causes of the accidents on site and (44%) do not train their workers on health and safety. Only (19%) were not aware of health and safety policies that ae in place. Getting caught in-between objects and falling debris or materials were the accidents that occurred most on construction sites at (62.5%) and (50%) respectively. Overall, the policies and legislations in place are fair enough and training of construction workers should be done more often on a daily or weekly basis. The DOSH needs to step up its role of inspection and monitoring of OSH activities on construction sites.