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Linnea Wikström, Global Director for Construction, Health and Safety at Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWI)
Linnea Wikström is Global Director for Construction, Health and Safety at Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWI), a global union federation representing 12 million workers in 111 countries. She leads BWI’s work to strengthen the role of trade unions and worker participation in improving safety standards across the construction sector.
We believe that no one should be injured simply for going to work. Yet construction remains one of the most dangerous industries globally. The World Risk Poll shows that more than one in five construction workers worldwide have experienced harm at work in the past two years. The project focuses on construction sites in Southern Asia and Northern Africa, where training and reporting are notably lacking: 81% of workers in Southern Asia and 88% in Northern Africa have never received safety training, while only 42% and 40%, respectively, report safety incidents. This compares to the already high global average in the construction sector, where of 61% never received occupational health and safety (OSH) training, but where the same percentage of 61% who were harmed in the past two years reported it to someone.
At the same time, many injuries and dangerous occurrences go unreported. Without accurate reporting and worker engagement, hazards remain unaddressed and opportunities for prevention are missed.
Our project seeks to understand how training, risk assessment and structured worker participation, including through trade union representation, can work together to reduce harm. We aim to move beyond standalone interventions and develop integrated, practical approaches that strengthen safety systems and contribute to engineering safer construction workplaces.
Over two years, we will work with one construction project in Pakistan and one in Tunisia, combining research with practical workplace improvements.
We will begin with surveys and in-depth interviews to understand current injury patterns, training provision, reporting systems and safety culture. This includes engaging workers and their representatives to ensure their perspectives inform the design of interventions.
We will then implement a comprehensive programme integrating site-specific risk assessments, targeted safety training and strengthened incident reporting systems. Worker participation — through elected safety representatives or bipartite safety committees — will form a core part of the approach.
By comparing conditions before and after implementation, we aim to generate evidence on how inclusive safety systems can improve outcomes in high-risk contexts.
The immediate beneficiaries are construction workers on the two pilot projects in Pakistan and Tunisia, particularly those undertaking high-risk tasks.
Training will be tailored to the specific hazards identified through risk assessments, ensuring it reflects real site conditions. Strengthened reporting systems will support earlier identification of risks and encourage learning from incidents and near misses.
By supporting structured worker participation in occupational safety and health processes, the project aims to strengthen safety culture and accountability at site level. When workers and their representatives are actively involved in monitoring and implementation, safety systems are more likely to be responsive and sustained. In the longer term, the model developed can inform safer practices on other construction projects in similar settings.
The Poll provides robust, country-level evidence that makes invisible risks visible. It shows both the scale of harm in construction and the strikingly low levels of safety training and reporting in Pakistan and Tunisia.
Without this data, we would not be able to clearly demonstrate the urgency of action or strategically target our intervention. The Poll also reveals a crucial insight: while workers who receive safety training are more likely to report harm, training alone does not necessarily reduce injury rates.
This finding shapes our approach. Instead of delivering training in isolation, we integrate it with risk assessment, reporting systems and worker empowerment. The Poll gives us the evidence base to design smarter interventions — and to engineer safety in a more systemic way.
To engineer lasting change, we need to work beyond individual sites. We want to engage construction companies and site managers, whose leadership is critical to embedding safer systems in daily practice.
We also will collaborate closely with our affiliated trade unions in the countries to strengthen worker voice in occupational safety and health. Engaging national authorities and labour inspectorates in Pakistan and Tunisia will help align our findings with policy and regulatory frameworks.
Finally, we aim to share our results with international organisations, including multilateral development banks, researchers and industry bodies working on construction safety. By communicating practical, evidence-based recommendations, we hope to influence both workplace practice and wider policy conversations about safer work.
To find out more about the project, get in touch with Linnea Wikström at linnea.wikstrom@bwint.org
Catherine Dudley, Research Officer at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) is using World Risk Poll data to map global exposure to workplace harm against social and economic conditions, to target interventions where they are most needed.
The OSH-Connect team from Monash University are using World Risk Poll data to build a single-source global database of country level occupational safety and health (OSH) statistics.
Professor Milena Nikolova from the University of Groningen is using World Risk Poll data to analyse how changing technologies affect safety in the workplace across different industries and countries, informing more targeted safety interventions.
