Ebola Safety Training

06 November 2014

The situation on the ground

Working in crisis situations is never easy and any support that can be given to management in maintaining safety on site is valuable. That is the situation for African Minerals based in Sierra Leone, where Ebola is constantly on the outbreak in West Africa.

They are adjusting to protect their employees and contractors by rapidly providing public health information in response to the crisis. African Minerals Limited is a minerals exploration, development and mining company. The company is currently focused on the development and mining of the world class iron ore deposit at Tonkolili and its related rail and port infrastructure. African Minerals are the largest employer in Sierra Leone and is set to become the largest contributor to the country’s GDP.

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Reacting Quickly

To date they have been able to maintain their mine complex securely and have not had any Ebola incidents with their own staff. There are ongoing checks for staff to make sure the virus is not spreading into the work environment.

Despite this, African Minerals felt that they should deal proactively with the situation and decided to use their orientation software to communicate further information about recognizing and containing the disease. Every contractor for African Minerals is orientated online before they arrive to start work. Topics such as environmental awareness, site safety, rail safety and now Ebola safety training are covered.

Of course, responding to crisis situations requires more than just technology. It also requires a flexible and accountable management structure that can make decisions quickly. Norm Spark, the Training and Development Superintendent at African Minerals is someone who feels that responding quickly takes priority and made the decision immediately to get the information campaign out to all staff. He felt that African Minerals had a responsibility to spread this information to his local staff and also into the wider community. Information is usually disseminated through word of mouth locally so providing the local staff with that information is hugely valuable to local communities.

As Spark says, “Our orientation software was the obvious choice when we realized we had to communicate quickly and clearly with all our staff about this crisis”.

Building the course

The orientation software provided by GoContractor had, to date, been used by African Minerals to orientate their staff online before they started work. African Minerals build the orientation course online and send it directly to each staff member via email. This ensures that when they arrive to site they can begin work immediately on validation.

Now, however, it is being used to respond to a different challenge. The course on Ebola awareness has been designed with the end user very much in mind. Among the local staff literacy rates are low and English is not the first language. Therefore, the course includes lots of images explaining symptoms and how to stay safe. There are also a number of explanatory videos. For this reason the GoContractor software platform is the perfect tool to communicate to large staff numbers quickly.

So was it a challenge to create the course at such short notice? Well Spark felt that with the experience they had of using the system for standard site orientations, driver orientations and visitor orientations they had a sufficient handle on the course builder to assemble a course without delay. The GoContractor platform is designed so that courses can be easily adapted to suit the changing hazards of the surrounding environment.

African Minerals are hoping to see the impact of the information release instantly among all their staff and the wider community in the bush. With these types of initiatives it is possible to fight the spread of the virus before it gains any further ground in West Africa.

If you require any further information on orientation software get in touch and we can walk you through how it might help you today.

Image (unaltered) by Athalia Christie (c)

Sonya Sikra

Sonya is the Brand Strategy Manager at GoContractor. She specializes in communicating how implementing tech in construction can drive productivity and profit.

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