Safety is a skill to be trained, certified and led, and in the South Region it starts from a low base

8.1 A steelworks concentrates the hazards of heavy industry

The International Finance Corporation’s environmental, health and safety guidelines for steel identify the occupational hazards specific to the industry: physical hazards from heavy loads, grinding and cutting and rolling; heat and hot liquids; radiation; respiratory hazards from dust and fumes; chemical hazards; noise; and fire and explosions, on top of the hazards common to all large industrial facilities, such as electricity, work at height and confined spaces [S55][S56]. In an EAF works, the most severe of these come together in the melt shop and the caster, where a small quantity of water trapped under molten steel can cause a violent explosion, and in the cranes that carry ladles of liquid steel overhead.

Globally, work remains a major cause of death. The International Labour Organization estimates that nearly three million workers die every year from work-related accidents and diseases: about 2.6 million from diseases and about 330,000 from accidents [S54]. Agriculture, construction, forestry and fishing, and manufacturing are the most hazardous sectors, accounting together for about 200,000 fatal injuries a year, 63% of the total [S54]. Men die from work-related causes at about three times the rate of women (51.4 against 17.2 per 100,000 working-age adults), reflecting their concentration in hazardous jobs [S54].

8.2 Cameroon’s baseline: frequent accidents and little insurance

Cameroon’s national employment survey asked workers whether they had suffered a work accident or an occupational disease in the previous twelve months. In 2021, 9.1% of employed persons reported an accident in their main job and 6.5% an occupational disease; only 11.0% were covered by insurance in their main job [S12]. The figures vary sharply by region (Figure 8.1). In the South Region, 15.4% of workers reported an accident and 15.5% an occupational disease, the highest disease rate of any region, while only 6.6% were insured [S12]. Workers in the formal private sector reported an accident rate of 9.3%, close to the average, but 55.8% of them were insured, against 5.6% in the non-agricultural informal sector [S12].

Source: INS, EESI3 Phase 1, main employment report, Table 3.24 [S12].

These self-reported figures are not comparable with the injury frequency rates that companies publish, which count lost-time injuries per million hours worked. They are, however, a clear signal: most Cameroonian workers, including those a Kribi steelworks would hire, have worked in environments where injuries are common, procedures are informal and insurance is absent. Fires and explosions are a recognised melt-shop hazard [S55][S56]. In 2024 the Ministry of Defence began building a fire and rescue centre to serve Douala’s industrial zone [S80].

The legal framework is in place. Cameroon’s Labour Code requires occupational health and safety conditions to be set by ministerial order in line with international labour standards and allows labour inspectors to order immediate measures (articles 95 and 96); makes a company medical service compulsory (articles 98 and 99); and creates a national commission for occupational health and safety (article 120) [S33]. Cameroon also ratified the ILO Occupational Safety and Health Convention, 1981 (No. 155) on 1 October 2021, which the ILO now counts among its fundamental conventions; it has not ratified the conventions on the promotional framework for occupational safety and health (No. 187), safety and health in construction (No. 167) or the prevention of major industrial accidents (No. 174) [S73][S74]. Employers pay occupational-injury contributions of 1.75%, 2.5% or 5% of gross salary according to the risk class of their activity [S32], which gives every employer a direct financial interest in preventing accidents. What the framework cannot supply is the competence and culture to apply it on the shop floor.

8.3 What good performance looks like in steel

The steel industry measures and publishes its safety performance more systematically than most. The World Steel Association’s sustainability indicators show a lost-time injury frequency rate (lost-time injuries and fatalities per million hours worked) of 0.85 in 2022, 0.76 in 2023 and 0.72 in 2024 for its reporting members, and an average of 6.77 to 8.98 training days per employee a year over the same period (Figure 8.2) [S51]. Its annual safety and health data report tracks potential serious injuries and fatalities, total recordable injuries, lost-time injuries, fatalities, process safety and sickness absence [S52], and the association has published a set of safety and health principles for the industry [S53].

Source: worldsteel, Sustainability Indicators, 2025 edition (2022 to 2024 data) [S51].

Two points stand out. First, frequency rates of below one lost-time injury per million hours are achievable in an industry with severe hazards; they result from systems, not luck. Second, training is continuous: the best performers spend several days a year per employee on training throughout working lives, not only at induction. For a new works, the benchmark is therefore not the Cameroonian average but the industry’s best practice, and the training budget should be sized to reach it.

8.4 Critical risks call for specific competences

Most fatal accidents in steel arise from a small number of critical risks, each with known controls. Table 8.1 lists the main ones for an EAF long-products works, with the controls and the competences each requires. The competences are the safety core of every role in the skills matrix of Chapter 4.

8.5 Culture matures step by step, and leaders set the pace

Rules and equipment do not on their own prevent accidents; behaviour does. Organisations typically move through recognisable steps, from a reactive culture in which safety is addressed after incidents and blame is the norm, through compliance with rules and permits, to a managed system of risk assessment and audit, and then to proactive and finally owned cultures in which leaders spend time in the field, near misses are reported freely and any worker can stop unsafe work without fear (Figure 8.3).

Source: Cameroon Steel framework, adapted from common practice in heavy-industry safety management.

For a new works in Cameroon, two transitions matter most. During construction, the challenge is to bring contractors, many of whom come from informal or reactive environments, to a managed system quickly: every worker on site needs a safety induction, a record of training and a clear right to refuse unsafe work, and every contractor needs a safety plan that is checked and enforced. During the first years of operation, the challenge is to build a proactive culture in which supervisors, most of them newly promoted, lead safety in the field. Cameroon Steel’s objective, set out in Figure 8.3, is a managed system across all contractors from the first year and a proactive culture in all process areas by the third year of operation.

8.6 Construction is the first test

The first safety test of a steelworks comes long before the first heat. During construction, between 600 and 1,000 workers employed by many contractors will work at height, lift heavy steel structures and equipment, dig foundations and trenches, and install high-voltage systems, often in tropical heat and heavy rain [S11]. Many of them will come from informal workplaces where procedures are rarely written down. Experience on large projects shows that a few practices determine whether construction is safe:

• A single set of site rules applied to every contractor and subcontractor, with the owner’s safety team empowered to stop work.
• Induction and competence checks before anyone starts work, recorded in the safety passport, with additional authorisations for lifting, work at height, excavation, hot work and electrical work.
• Supervision ratios that keep a competent supervisor close to every crew engaged in high-risk work, and daily briefings on the day’s hazards.
• Lift planning for every heavy or non-routine lift, approved by a competent person, with exclusion zones enforced.
• Heat and rain management, including work-rest cycles, drinking water, shaded rest areas and suspension of work at height or lifting in storms.
• Medical cover and emergency response on site from the first day, with evacuation arrangements to a hospital able to treat serious trauma and burns.

Construction is also where the safety culture of the future plant is set. Workers who move from construction into operations, and supervisors who learn to run a disciplined site, carry those habits into the works. Contractors who perform well on safety should be rewarded with future work; those who do not should be removed.

8.7 Process safety and emergency response

Beyond personal safety, a steelworks must manage process safety: the prevention of major events such as explosions from water in contact with molten metal, failures of furnace cooling systems, releases of carbon monoxide from off-gas systems, oxygen fires and large fires in hydraulic or cable systems. The worldsteel safety and health data report tracks process safety as a distinct indicator [S52], and the IFC’s steel guidelines identify fire and explosion as a specific hazard of the industry [S55]. Process safety depends on design, but also on skills: operators who understand why interlocks exist and do not bypass them, maintenance technicians who restore protective systems correctly, and emergency teams trained and drilled for the plant’s worst credible events. A works at Kribi should also coordinate its emergency plans with neighbouring tenants of the industrial zone and with local emergency services, so that resources can be shared in a major incident.

8.8 Health is part of the same skill set

Occupational health in a steelworks covers heat, noise, dust and fumes, and the ergonomic strain of manual tasks. The Labour Code’s requirement for a company medical service [S33] provides the base: pre-employment and periodic medical examinations, hearing and lung-function monitoring, and heat-stress management. The South Region adds public-health priorities that a responsible employer cannot ignore: in the 2018 national health survey, HIV prevalence among adults aged 15 to 49 was 5.8% in the South, the highest of any region, and 33.4% of children aged 6 to 59 months tested positive for malaria, against 24.0% nationally [S61]. A workforce health programme that includes prevention, testing and treatment referrals for HIV, malaria prevention at accommodation and on site, and health education for workers’ families protects both people and production.

8.9 Making safety a certified skill

Safety becomes a skill when it is taught to a standard, tested and recorded. Four instruments can make that happen in the Kribi cluster:

• A management system to an international standard. ISO 45001, published in 2018, specifies requirements for occupational health and safety management systems [S58]. Designing the works’ system to that standard from the start, and requiring it of major contractors, gives a common language for audits and improvement.
• A safety passport for every worker. A personal record of inductions, training modules, authorisations and medical clearances, recognised by all employers in the zone, would allow contractors’ workers to move between sites without repeating basic training, and would make it impossible to work on a critical task without the right authorisation.
• Competence-based authorisations. Permits to work, lockout and tagout, confined-space entry, crane operation and electrical switching should be authorised only after training and a practical assessment, renewed periodically.
• Simulation and incident learning. Simulators and animated incident videos, such as those offered by worldsteel’s steeluniversity [S50], allow workers to rehearse emergencies; a no-blame system for reporting and learning from near misses turns everyday events into training material.

International lenders will expect this. IFC Performance Standard 2 requires employers to provide a safe and healthy work environment and to protect workers, including those engaged by contractors and in the supply chain [S57]. For Cameroon Steel, however, the reason is more direct: a works whose workforce is largely new to heavy industry can only be safe if safety is taught first, tested always and led by example.