LAUSR

Senegal like nearly all African’s countries has experienced Occupational Health Services (OHS) through their coloniser. Thus, Senegal has inherited French experience and Ghana and Cabo Verde respectively the English and Portuguese ones. There is a huge disparity between them in terms of OHS policy, strategy, legislation and implementation, institutional and human resources, service model and level of coverage, content and activities, and financing and so on. For example when look at the level of OHS coverage, South Africa has 35%, Egypt 25%, Mali 15%, while Senegal and Zimbabwe have the same coverage 0%. The Senegalese OHS experience, which can exemplify the African profile in this domain, had originated from the French overseas labour code of 1952. Occupational safety and hygiene and health and namely OHS has followed the manufacturing and mining and alimentary industries established in Senegal and several West African and African countries. In Senegal, the evolution of occupational Health and OHS can be represented into four steps. The first one called the colonial experience, took place before the independences in 1960. The second step, which goes from 1960 to 1987, can be considered like the neocolonial one as the new national authorities have entirely copied the overseas legal provisions in the labour code of 1960. The third step 1988 to 2012, has allowed genuinely the development of Occupational Health and OHS according to ILO normative basis. And finally, the last step 2013 to 2017 has given many opportunities and future priorities in developing OH and OHS through a five year action plan 2017–2021 of the national program of safety and health, which has retained four priorities among which the implementation of OHS for 80% of all enterprises.