Hima Cement marks 500 Days without a Lost Time Injury

Our Journey to Zero Harm

There are a wide range of risks and hazards associated with our type of large scale mining and manufacturing operations and that’s why safety remains a top priority for us. They include working at height, mobile equipment, and energy isolation, working in confined spaces among others.

We are committed to ensuring the safety of our employees and contractors while at work and outside, with zero fatalities and preventing injuries. We believe that no job is so important that anybody should be hurt doing it.

Over the years Hima Cement has implemented a number of safety improvements and initiatives to drive the safety culture.

• Increased worker engagement and targeted training for employees
• Digitization to improve efficiency and reduce human interaction;
• Implementation of consequence and reward management to reduce H&S violations;
• Implementation of fatality elimination controls to minimize critical incidents
• Incident reporting is encouraged for all employees and contractors
• Thorough investigations and root-cause analysis is carried out for all incidents.
• All employees get a mandatory annual medical assessment.

Driving Visible Leadership through Boots on Ground Program

We believe that leadership is critical in building our safety culture. Under the campaign of Boots on Ground, leaders are required to spend at least 1hour per day on the shop floor and to use that “Time in the Field”  to build  positive behavior  and effective relationships to enhance our safety performance.

We are told that about 5% of incidents are due to the failure of equipment and systems. The other 95% are due to the behavior of people. The objective is to find out what people are doing, if they understand the risks involved in the tasks they are undertaking and what they are doing to eliminate the risk of an injury. It is just as important to make observations and report any unsafe acts or conditions so that they are immediately resolved or corrected.

Improving Road Safety

Hima Cement has extensive experience in road transport, with more than 3 million ton of material transported every year across Uganda, DRC and Kenya, with approximately 800 dedicated trucks.  We carry the same ambition to our road operations – to operate with zero harm, ensuring that our drivers and other road users are safe on the road.

Hima Cement migrated to a new In Vehicle Monitoring System - Mix Telematics in order to promote road safety, quality and ensure data reliability from the system in regards to driver and truck performance. As such, recordable road fatalities reduced from 5 to 0, driver performance improved from 75% to 98% and truck turnaround time from 4 days to 2.5 days over a period of two years.