Ask a site supervisor in Tema, a facilities manager in Airport City, or an HR officer at a bank what “health and safety training” means and you will get three different answers: toolbox talks and PPE; fire drills and evacuation plans; a certificate to file before the auditors arrive. All three are part of it. None of them is the whole of it.
We teach occupational health and safety at Dalex Institute of Technology in Accra as one half of our Security Management & Occupational Health and Safety course, so we spend a lot of time explaining what a course should and should not promise. This guide sets that out plainly — whether or not you end up training with us.
Why health and safety training is an employer’s duty in Ghana, not an option
Three pieces of Ghanaian law sit behind every workplace safety conversation:
- The Labour Act, 2003 (Act 651), Part XV places a general duty on every employer to ensure that each worker works under satisfactory, safe and healthy conditions, and on workers to use the safety appliances and follow the safety rules they are given. It also requires employers to report occupational accidents and diseases. This is the clause a labour inspector — or a lawyer after an accident — reaches for first.
- The Factories, Offices and Shops Act, 1970 (Act 328) is older and more specific: registration of premises, machinery guarding, welfare facilities, and the Factories Inspectorate that enforces them. Much of the compliance paperwork that a manufacturing or warehousing site keeps traces back to this Act.
- The Workmen’s Compensation Act, 1987 (PNDCL 187) governs what an employer pays when a worker is injured or killed at work. It is the reason a documented safety programme is also a financial control.
Above the statutes sit the international standards that larger clients increasingly write into contracts — most often ISO 45001, the occupational health and safety management-system standard — and sector rules from bodies such as the Minerals Commission for mining and the Ghana National Fire Service for fire certification. A mine contractor, a construction firm bidding for a bank’s new branch, or a security company placing guards at an embassy will each be asked, in some form, “show us your safety training records.”
That is the practical reason the demand for health and safety training in Ghana has grown: it is a condition of doing business with the organisations that pay best.
What a good occupational health and safety course covers
A course can be short and still complete. What matters is that these topics are taught as skills you practise, not slides you sit through:
- The legal framework, in plain language. What Act 651 and Act 328 actually require of a supervisor, what must be reported and to whom, and where the workplace’s own policies have to go further than the law.
- Hazard identification. Walking a real workplace — an office, a workshop, a site — and finding what can cause harm: physical, chemical, electrical, ergonomic, biological, psychosocial. This is a habit of looking, and it has to be practised.
- Risk assessment. Rating likelihood and severity, deciding what is tolerable, and writing the assessment down in a form someone else can act on. A course that does not make you complete at least one full written risk assessment has skipped the core skill.
- The hierarchy of controls. Eliminate, substitute, engineer, administer, and only then PPE. Most weak safety programmes in Ghana start and end at PPE; a trained safety officer knows why that is the last resort, not the first.
- Incident reporting and investigation. Recording near-misses as well as injuries, finding root causes rather than blaming the injured worker, and closing the loop with a corrective action that is checked.
- Fire safety and emergency planning. Fire risk assessment, extinguisher types and their limits, evacuation routes and assembly points, drills, and the fire warden role. In a country where the fire certificate is a licensing condition for many premises, this module is not optional.
- Welfare, PPE, and occupational health. Selecting and enforcing the right equipment, but also the quieter hazards: heat, noise, dust, manual handling, and long hours.
- Safety communication. Toolbox talks, inductions for new workers and contractors, signage, and how to persuade a crew that has “always done it this way.” Safety fails in the gap between the policy and the person on the floor; this module closes it.
- Building a safety programme. Turning all of the above into a written, owned, reviewed programme with responsibilities, schedules, and records — the document an auditor or client asks to see.
If a course brochure lists fewer than these, ask what has been left out and why.
How to choose a health and safety course in Accra
The checklist we give our own students and their employers:
- Insist on a practical assessment. You should finish having written a risk assessment, planned an emergency response, and investigated an incident scenario — and been marked on them. A multiple-choice test alone does not prove you can do the job.
- Ask who teaches it. Practitioners who have run safety on real sites in Ghana bring the cases, the shortcuts people take, and the arguments you will actually face. Ask for the instructors’ backgrounds.
- Match the credential to the claim. A DIT course leads to a DIT Certificate of Completion. International schemes such as NEBOSH or IOSH award their own certificates through their own examinations. Any provider that implies one is the other is misleading you. Be equally wary of “internationally certified” with no named certifying body behind it.
- Check that the certificate can be verified. Employers increasingly check. Ours can be confirmed online at dit.edu.gh/verify from the serial number printed on the certificate.
- Choose a schedule you will finish. Morning, evening, weekend, or intensive. The best course is the one you complete.
- Be honest about duration. A two-day awareness session is valuable and has its place; it is not the same as six weeks of supervisory training. Buy the one that matches the role.
Where DIT’s course fits
DIT’s Security Management & Occupational Health and Safety course is a 6-week part-time course (2 weeks intensive) at our Accra campus, in morning, evening, and weekend streams. It combines the security-management foundation — threat assessment, risk reduction, security operations — with the occupational health and safety modules above, because in most Ghanaian organisations the same supervisor or manager carries both responsibilities. Learners who pass the practical assessment receive a DIT Certificate of Completion in Security Management & Occupational Health and Safety.
Two things it deliberately is not: it is not a NEBOSH or IOSH programme, and it is not a substitute for the site-specific inductions a workplace must run itself. It is the supervisory foundation those sit on.
For fire-specific roles, DIT also runs a self-paced Fire Warden Training Course on DIT Virtual Learning, which can be taken from anywhere.
Next steps
Read the Security & Safety stream page for the current line-up and intake, or talk to admissions about which stream fits your week. If you are an employer looking to train a group, tell us the roles and the site; a course built around your actual hazards is better than a generic one.