Believing in the ethos of corporate social responsibility, Grameenphone always strives to uphold the standards in all its business operations. Ensuring secured work place is no exception. In order to minimize accidents at the workplace and at the project sites, GP regularly undertakes awareness programs as well as necessary training programs for GP employees and vendors/suppliers regarding various Health, Safety and Environment issues. Though the employees of our vendors are not directly employed by us, through our contractual agreement with the vendors, we aim to ensure safe and secured working condition for their employees when they are working for us. However, we are aware that this is a continuous process and there are always opportunities to raise the collective performance level with respect to health and safety standards. Due to our scale of operations dispersed across the country while the local vendors/suppliers having low awareness on standard HSE practices, we consistently endeavor to address this issue through necessary phase-by-phase capacity building exercises.
Unfortunately some recent accidents occurring in our work place made us more concerned and alert to ensure that required standards are adhered to, especially by our vendors. On a few of these occasions, the victims, mostly employees of our vendors, regrettably succumbed to his/her injuries. Though safety measures were in place, while these accidents occurred, they had proved to be inadequate to prevent these accidents from happening. In these accidents, 3 vendor workers died falling to the ground from roof-top or exceed while 2 other died due to electrocution while erecting billboard, 1 due to a fall into an acid tub in vendor’s factory premise, 1 from snake bite and another one from a heart attack while sleeping. On other occasions, a young girl died of electrocution from a wire in the fence of a storage area adjacent to a construction site while a 70-year old woman died as she was hit by a GP vehicle on Mymensingh highway.
In light of these recent regrettable incidents, Grameenphone has commissioned a team having the Head of HSE as the team leader. The team will directly report to the CEO on the following immediate tasks which include:
1. Inspections at some factory premises to instantly show cause if any deviation is found from the standard or agreement.
2. Educate the vendors and suppliers on Health, Safety and Environmental (HSE) issues. The aim is to make the vendors and the suppliers capable enough by themselves to follow and practice HSE and corporate responsibilities in their daily activities. The focus will be targeted at the following areas:
a. Setup a more Comprehensive Guideline and enhance competence of the vendor on HSE compliance.
b. Benchmark setting on safe working condition including ILO and international best-practices and Standard Operation Procedure (SOP).
c. Regular audit of vendors/suppliers.
Telenor has extended its cooperation with Det Norske Veritas (DNV) as an advisor to perform mapping and review of HSE standards at relevant supplier in markets where Telenor has operations. DNV has already performed an independent assessment on working conditions and production standards at the appropriate suppliers’ facilities to provide necessary counsel to GP.
N:B: Information collected form : http://www.grameenphone.com/index.php?id=400