What is OSHAfrica?
OSHAfrica is a pan-African occupational safety and health organization, legally registered under the OSHAfrica brand. The idea to create it arose in 2015 during a conference of the International Commission on Occupational Health (ICOH) held in Seoul, South Korea, and its legal constitution was formalized in 2017.
It is a continental entity, not a public body or an agency of any specific state. Its administrative office is located in Lagos, Nigeria, but its governance structure is organized through leadership distributed across the various subregions of Africa, reflecting a desire not to concentrate its activity in a single country.
Their verified institutional domain is oshafrica.africa. The .org extension associated with the same name does not correspond to an operational site of the organization, so it is always advisable to use the .africa domain when searching for official information.
Purpose and scope of action
OSHAfrica’s stated purpose is to bring together occupational safety and health professionals from Africa to facilitate collaboration and the exchange of knowledge and data between countries and subregions of the continent, and to create a space of international visibility for that professional community.
Its scope of action is continental. Unlike the typical national professional associations in Europe or Latin America, OSHAfrica explicitly positions itself as a platform for integration between highly heterogeneous national prevention systems, on a continent where institutional coverage of occupational safety and health is uneven between countries and where informal employment represents a significant part of working activity, thus limiting the reach of much of the conventional prevention legislation.
Functions and main lines of work
OSHAfrica declares several lines of activity.
- Research and data. He directs and promotes research on occupational safety and health in Africa, an area where the availability of comparable data between countries is limited.
- International collaboration. Works with international organizations in the development of OSH projects and databases.
- Incident Reporting. Promotes processes for reporting workplace accidents and incidents.
- Advising public officials. Advises national authorities and the African Union on the design of labor policies related to occupational safety and health.
- Improvement of national standards. Works to improve occupational safety and health standards in various African countries.
- Professional visibility. It seeks to create a unified digital space that gives international visibility to African OSH professionals.
Contribution to safety and health at work
OSHAfrica’s main contribution is serving as a continental platform for collaboration in a field where, due to Africa’s vast size and heterogeneity, no equivalent professional space previously existed. Its value lies not in issuing regulations, which remains the responsibility of each individual state, but in building bridges between national prevention systems with very different levels of institutional development.
This function is especially relevant in a context where much of the continent’s economic activity takes place in the informal economy, beyond the direct reach of labor inspections and formal occupational health and safety management systems. OSHAfrica’s work in providing data and advising the African Union aims, therefore, to establish common benchmarks for comparison and improvement, which are difficult to achieve on a country-by-country basis.
Relationship with the ORP International Foundation
OSHAfrica stands apart from other members of the ORP International Foundation’s institutional advisory committee because it does not represent a single country: it is a pan-African organization, conceived in 2015 and legally established in 2017, with an administrative office in Lagos and a governance structure comprised of leaders distributed across the continent’s various subregions. Its participation brings a continental perspective to the committee that is uncommon among the other members.
Practical application
For a professional or a company with operations in several African countries, OSHAfrica can serve as a point of contact to understand the landscape of OSH training and the prevention culture in different subregions of the continent, without replacing the direct consultation of the regulations in force in each country, which remains the only binding source in terms of preventive obligations.
For those investigating the state of occupational safety and health in Africa from outside the continent, OSHAfrica is a useful reference for professional contacts and aggregated data, in an area where comparable information between countries is generally scarcer than in Europe or Latin America.
