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South East Asia

Developing safety-critical skills.

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Husni Athaillah Senior Business Development Manager, TWI Indonesia

Poor welding plays a role in thousands of work-related accidents in South East Asia every year. We're raising the standards and saving lives.

An engineer welding at height.

SEASEP - empowering engineers

A welded joint slips, a steel girder shifts, a pipe cracks, a structure moves...the results can be catastrophic, not just in terms of damaged property but also in lives lost and families destroyed. Across South East Asia, 124,000 people are injured at work every year – and poor welding practices make a significant contribution to that statistic.

Husni Athaillah of The Welding Institute (TWI) is quick to emphasise the importance that welding has on plant and infrastructure. “Too often, you can trace failures back to incorrect welding and ineffective inspection,” he says. “The solution is to ensure that international standards are always followed – but that’s not easy. Historically, countries such as Indonesia simply don’t have enough well-trained engineers to create safer working environments and save lives.”

A construction worker in South East Asia.

That’s where funding from Lloyd’s Register Foundation is making a real difference. Our support is enabling Husni’s team at TWI to train a new generation of engineers, including empowering many women to follow what has traditionally been a male-dominated career path. Through the SEASEP initiative – the South East Asia Skills Enhancement Programme – TWI has enabled over 1,800 people to date to gain international welding qualifications. Among that number are many women, 80 of whom have received 100% scholarships.

SEASEP aims to upskill a further 2,000 engineers next year, bringing welding and non-destructive training to disadvantaged and under-represented groups, opening up valuable and important careers in safety-critical industries, raising standards and saving lives.

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