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"As an organisation with experienced engineering professionals, we have a duty to orient aspirant engineers towards a new safety dispensation and develop new standards that can effectively mitigate some of the accidents occurring in this sector." Eng. Margaret Ogai, Registrar/Chief Executive Officer, Engineers Board of Kenya. 

The Engineers Board of Kenya (EBK) is the statutory body responsible for engineering regulation, training and practice in Kenya. They are committed to enhancing engineering capabilities by incorporating safety and technology into the development agenda of Kenya's built environment industry. This includes delivering engineering solutions to address increasing socioeconomic challenges across Kenya, including housing deficits and collapsed buildings. 

“We are a State corporation, which means we have an Act of Parliament that backs the activities that we do, and we, therefore, represent public interests, not just the engineers as such, but the whole value chain of engineering . . . from basic education to women’s university programmes,” explains Margaret Ogai.

���ϳԹ��� first approach

With funding from ���ϳԹ���, EBK is transforming safety culture throughout the Kenyan construction industry. “Programme for the Enhancement of ���ϳԹ��� Skills for Engineers and Practitioners in the Construction Industry in Kenya” is an ambitious capacity development programme, which is supporting the development of curricula, courses and monitoring tools, so practitioners and workers have the capacity, capability and understanding to identify and address risks to safety on construction sites around the country.

“We want to look at university students, particularly those who are being trained to be engineers, and we want to include safety-related aspects in their curriculum. As an organisation with experienced engineering professionals, we have a duty to orient aspirant engineers towards a new safety dispensation and develop new standards that can effectively mitigate some of the accidents occurring in this sector,” Ogai explains.

A key consideration in addressing sectoral challenges is to assess the use and value of monitoring and evaluation processes: “I think we are not very good at collecting data, even to inform future policy and advocacy frameworks, so we want to come up with an effective monitoring and evaluation framework, which will accurately monitor progress and help us to identify [any] gaps.”

This article was originally published in ���ϳԹ��� News. It can be read in full .