Developing an index to enhance construction safety in the global South region.

Abstract

Due to the complexity and dynamic nature of construction sites, safety is increasingly becoming crucial. Findings from previous studies and the literature found construction to be one of the most hazardous industries in the world. Lebanon, a developing country in the Middle East, is no exception as it fails to implement safety regulations and witnesses lack of safety incentives, training and education, especially at the level of the foremen and workers. Moreover, no study has attempted to analyze in detail the injuries resulting from hazardous construction works in order to understand the underlying problem and further highlight the safety practices that are being neglected. Therefore, there is a need to analyze recent construction injuries incurred by workers and construction personnel from the Lebanese construction industry with the aim of enhancing the safety performance of contractors and improve their safety strategies. As such, the objective of this study is two-fold: (1) analyzing the injuries incurred by the construction industry in Lebanon and (2) proposing a tool that calculates the safety index for contractors by evaluating both the safety practices that the contractor implements and the injuries incurred by the same contractor. The proposed tool can be adopted by other contracting firms from various developing countries that share common characteristics with Lebanon and lack national safety laws. The index can potentially enhance the safety environment of their construction industry, especially at the level of the contracting firms’ safety performances.