Occupational Health and Safety Challenges in Developing Countries: Gaps, Opportunities and Policy Implications

Abstract

Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) in 2025 has a bleak vision of the world: where the Global North lives in the world of high-tech mental health and AI-inspired analytics, the Global South is concerned with survival on the basic physical levels and the threat of chemicals. The structural imbalances that lead to this divide, which have been discussed in this paper, include the Exportation of hazardous manufacturing to less-regulated markets and the increasing risk of extreme heat due to climate change, which in particular applies to the outdoor workers in tropical regions who constitute 80 percent of the workforce. It is this invisibility that creates a vacuum of data that hides the urgency of reform. However, the article finds significant leapfrog opportunities for traditional, costly safety bureaucracies in adopting digital-first ecosystems. The inclusion of OHS in the Universal Healthcare, mobile-based reporting, and IoT sensors to monitor in real-time, and the introduction of incentive-based compliance among the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are the most prominent recommendations. The paper concludes that technological innovation and community-based safety models, which would result in sustainable economic growth and protection of human dignity in the Global South, are the only solution to this dis-connectivity.