OHS Project in Tanzania
The OHS project has worked through the Tanzanian affiliates of the International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF), which is an institutional member of WIEGO. The unions involved were the Conservation, Hotel and Domestic Workers Union (CHODAWU), the Tanzania Union of Industrial and Commercial Workers (TUICO), and the Tanazania Plantation and Agricultural Workers Union (TPAWU).
Focus groups with workers in three sectors─domestic work, agriculture, and street trade─were carried out by the unions.
Vicky Kanyoka, African Regional Coordinator of the International Domestic Worker's Network (IDWN), coordinated the project; Masuma Mamdani researched and wrote the background papers.
The OHS work coincided with the succesful campaign for an ILO Convention on Decent Work for Domestic Workers and its accompanying Recomendation (C189) was passed at the 100th International Labour Conference in Geneva in June 2011. During the campaign Vicky used the research on the working conditions of domestic workers in Tanzania, which was generated by the OHS project.
In Tanzania many women still work in the agricultural sector. For this reason the project commissioned an additional case study on the working conditions of women seaweed farmers on Zanzibar. The study was done by Flower Msuya of the Institute for Marine Sciences at the University of Dar es Salaam. Read the full study or see a short summary in OHS Newsletter 2.
