By Our Reporters
As recent as last year, the ever worsening unemployment scourge prompted Ugandan business entrepreneur Agnes Mpairwe to do something remedial. As a well paid consultant advising big city corporate organizations on occupational safety and health at the work place, Mpairwe (who in 2014/15 returned from work in UK) would often be asked to recommend young graduates to be gainfully employed as safety officers in well paying corporate companies but she couldn’t find any suitably qualified graduates. “It was very painful seeing one of the organizations employ an Indian to earn Shs7m per month as a safety officer because I had failed to recommend the person they wanted. I had failed to find fresh engineering graduates possessed with adequate skills on occupation health and safety. As I reflected on that another organization employed a Mzungu on equally well remunerated terms still because our own children the Ugandans are devoid of the requisite skills,”
Mpairwe explains during a Wednesday interview with this news website. She says it was even more disturbing when she advertised the job of Principal to head the Exceed Institute for Occupational Safety & Health (EiOSH) that she eventually started in Kololo to try and fill the human resource skills gap regarding occupation safety and health. This was through public advertisement in the national newspapers of wide circulation but still none of the Ugandans who applied possessed the requisite skills required in the job specification. “It’s a well remunerated job and so we had Professors from Makerere and other places applying but they couldn’t qualify. In the end we had to hire someone from outside Uganda to come and help us produce many more professionals possessed with these much demanded skills to serve as safety officers,” Mpairwe says with remorsefulness written all over her face. In the end she hired Vivienne Laing, an expatriate from Scotland who is now spearheading efforts to develop a comprehensive curriculum for the Kololo-based Exceed Institute to carry on with training programs on occupation safety and health. The trainees will acquire all manner of qualifications ranging from certificate, diploma, bachelors and post graduate levels. Mpairwe won’t reveal how much Laing earns per month but it’s very good money given her status as a well experienced expatriate in the same field.
Assistant Commissioner Francis Gimoro
The Institute, the first of its kind in Uganda, is dully licensed and regulated by the Ministries of Gender and Educations whose other regulator NCHE will soon accredit Exceed Institute’s academic programs for which Ugandans will be affordably enrolling. Assistant Commissioner Francis Gimoro on Wednesday drove to the Kololo Institute where he spent the whole day talking to young University students who have been enrolled to be the pioneer intern-trainees to get hands-on skilling and training under OSHIP. This is the internship program through which Exceed Institute has partnered with Uganda Manufacturers Association (UMA)to expeditiously address the personnel gap regarding the much needed safety officers in the Ugandan labor market. UMA has already identified manufacturing and construction companies to which the 100 OSHIP interns will be attached for a 10 weeks rigorous practical training experience. For 4 weeks the trainees, mostly engineering students from Makerere and Kyambogo, will undergo work place accidents mitigation training at Exceed Institute and thereafter be mentored for remainder of the weeks at the business premises of their respective host companies. OSHIP Project Manager Dennis Apunyo says the internship program is aimed at comprehensively equipping the engineering students with problem-solving & communication skills besides innovations, and quick decision-making competences.
THE FEES PART:
Mr. Hillary Kodemu, who is the Innovations & Planning Director at the Institute, says the Shs550,000 each of the well vetted interns will pay is not only affordable but very little compared to the extent to which this 10 week internship training is going to improve their employability after campus. “We are really in this not necessarily for money because the Shs550,000 that has been levied is nothing compared to the extent to which their employability is going to improve. And by the way, occupational health is globally very expensive and it’s inevitable for communities to invest in it given the contemporary challenges we face as humanity,” Kodemu said during the Wednesday launching ceremony for the OSHIP program. He was supported by Exceed Institute Governing Board Chairman Arinaitwe Rugyendo (who is also the Red Pepper Director) who told the excited intern students that this was a major step to overcome unemployment because the position of safety officer is increasingly becoming relevant for both public and private employers who are by law required to secure their work place environment. “This is an opportunity for you to be looked for by the prospective employers as opposed to walking everywhere on the streets looking for jobs as fresh graduates,” Rugyendo said. Gimoro was grateful to Mpairwe for coming up with something that will result into a comprehensive PPP deal between his Ministry and Exceed Institute. It emerged the Gender ministry (and indeed the whole country) even doesn’t have a testing laboratory where industrial and construction chemicals can be tested as to their acceptability regarding the occupational safety and health standards prescribed in the relevant Act that Uganda hastily enacted in 2006 because it wanted to boost its eligibility to host the 2007 Chogm meeting. Deprived of funds, the Gender Ministry has prompted Exceed Institute to establish one such state of the art laboratory at their Kololo premises that will be used for training purposes and to also test such chemicals for the whole country. In agreeing with Rugyendo, Mpairwe said fires like the one at the Budo School that saw kids burn to ashes are proof that it’s high time each school is compelled to have a safety officer to mitigate against such accidents. “It may appear a cost to the schools but it’s inevitable if we are to enhance safety at the work place and in our academic institutions. For a start we are proposing that for the start let each school at least support the matron or one of the teachers to acquire these well certified skills so that we can cheaply improvise,” says Mpairwe who is also already in talks with both police and KCCA to partner and enhance safety of the public on our streets and in other public places. “Especially police they are spending a lot on deployments of officers everywhere yet there is a more modern way to have these things done and it’s cost-saving.” The Institute Principal Vivienne Laing says that the OSHIP program is timely and something for which everybody must enroll: “because globally being an excellent engineer and possessing safety skills are closely connected just like the combination of bread and butter.” She adds: “This is the only way to reduce work place injury yet the unfortunate bit is that many of the fresh graduate engineers don’t even know how to administer first aid in case of a work place accident. They ought to be appropriately skilled and equipped with work place risk assessment skills and how to respond to a fire at a work place.” The facilitators for the (OSHIP) internship program will come from 5 major engineering disciplines making this a transformative experience for the students. “It’s really about knowledge transfer. Knowledge has been transferred to the Institute Staff who will transfer it to the students who in turn transfer the same to the host company and this makes it a win-win situation for everyone,” says the Principal.
ABOUT THE INSTITUTE
Exceed Institute, that is located opposite SMS1 media below the Kololo Airstrip, began as a consultancy firm in 2015 and their biggest area for consulting was safety at the work place. The consultancy firm helped many corporate entities improve their responses to occurrences like fire accidents and other work place-related accidents with potential to result into employee or customer injury. The clients served so far in the consulting capacity include UCC, Housing Finance Bank, Prof Peter Mugenyi’s Joint Clinical Research Center (JCRC) and others. The firm also has strong partnership with entities like Roko Construction, KCCA and UNRA etc. Plans are underway for the firm to equip their relevant staff with occupational safety and health skills for purposes of enhancing security of their respective work place environment. Mpairwe says it was during these interactions that she realized the vast need for specifically well qualified safety officers and the starting point had to be future graduates who have already qualified as engineers but lacked an elaborate aspect of occupational safety and health in their university curriculum. “This is why we are transforming the consultancy into a training institute because they are many jobs out there for safety officers and we should be able to recommend such graduates whenever such corporate entities ask for such people,” says Mpairwe who is overseeing a big team of staffers including some sourced from companies where they have accumulated lots of hands-on experience. The certification will evidence who has qualified from the Institute. Mpairwe hopes that in the coming years neighboring countries will be benchmarking on Uganda and thereby enabling our country to export safety officers and bring in foreign exchange. For comments on this & other Mulengera news stories, reach us on 0703164755!
