Louis Wustemann, a Trustee at One Percent Safer Foundation, discusses a project in Ethiopia focused on good safety practices at its core.
The trustees of the One Percent Safer Foundation, the charity set up to distribute the profits from the One Percent Safer book and other income from donations, have had some proud moments in the past couple of years. We have been able to say “Yes” to requests to help greenlight some projects that make small but important contributions to improving the occupational health and safety of workers in parts of the world where disproportionate numbers are killed and maimed every day.
One of those projects was setting up a bakery and brickworks in the fast-expanding town of Harbu Chulule 180km south west of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.
The new businesses are being grown by the NGO HOPEthiopia, which has previously set up schools, medical facilities and reforestation initiatives in Ethiopia and Rwanda. One Percent Safer responded to a request to fund the appointment and training of a health and safety adviser to ensure workers at the businesses are protected.
The bakery is open for business and is working towards a business plan production target of up to 650 loaves a day, plus other baked goods. Muluneh Debissa was appointed to oversee health and safety. In late Spring this year he was trained in food hygiene, risk management, and operating and training procedures by Rick Theriau, Director of risk management consultancy, vPSI, in Calgary Canada, who has volunteered with HOPEthiopia for 13 years.
Rick, whose career includes almost 10 years in safety roles in oil field services specialist Haliburton, has seen Harbu Chulule grow from 2500 to around 32,000 inhabitants. Rick says the two new ventures are intended to create self-sustaining businesses that provide goods and employment to the town, with an expected workforce of around 100 when the brickworks is up and running.
Good safety practice is essential in providing new jobs, Rick says, because the lack of state social security provision means they risk being reduced to begging on the streets if they are disabled by a workplace injury.
Appointing Muluneh from among the town’s residents was important. “Getting someone who has local credibility, knows the culture and can communicate in their language some of the rudimentary hazards is important,” says Rick.
One Percent Safer’s grant covered the flight costs for Rick to Ethiopia to train the safety and health adviser, training materials and Muluneh’s salary for a year. The One Percent Safer Board also decided to add the cost of a professional subscription to one of the international OSH professional bodies so the adviser will be able to draw on a range of OSH resources.
Louis Wustemann, Trustee at One Percent Safer Foundation.
The main hazards the adviser will have to manage are not all task-related, Rick notes: “Anyone working is swarmed by 50 inquisitive people getting in the way. There will be some crowd control to move people away from hazardous areas.”
Mululeh is supplementing his work in the bakery with teaching risk awareness in Harbu Chulule’s schools. “What better way to change the culture than to take that to the school children and to start to introduce safety concepts into the curriculum?” says Rick.
The One Percent Safer Foundation’s trustees have made a series of grants like this one to help fulfil our charitable aims, which include supporting other charities to improve their health and safety provision as well as decreasing the global burden of workplace harm. If you would like to propose a project for us to help fund, or would like to donate or help us raise funds, please contact us at [email protected]
*One Percent Safer will be talking about its work in Ethiopia and beyond when it leads a session at the International Institute of Leadership & Safety Culture’s (IILSC) inaugural EHS Congress London, on 3-4 December 2024. To find out more and to register, visit the IILSC website.
