Our safety data

Monitoring and reporting on our safety performance is essential to ensure the safety of everyone working with us – our employees, our contractors and suppliers, and their own employees and contractors. It also helps us to focus on and address the risks that are inherent in our industry.

We want our own teams, our suppliers, our stakeholders and others in our industry to learn from the performance data we share. In the case of fatalities, we set a wide boundary for our in-scope reporting. In contrast with many businesses, which only report employee fatalities on their own premises, we report fatalities involving any of our suppliers’ employees and contractors (across all Tiers) and members of the public, regardless of whether these fatalities occur on Vodafone premises or at other locations such as on public roads. We investigate and report openly on our findings in the case of fatalities within our reporting boundary, including instances where we conclude that our safety controls did not function as intended or that they could have been enhanced.

Fatalities

Any injury is one too many, and any loss of life related to our operations is unacceptable. It is therefore with great regret that we report three recordable fatalities this year. One in Ghana, one in the Democratic Republic of Congo (‘DRC’) and one in Lesotho (see chart below).

We have undertaken thorough investigations into the causes of each fatal incident and defined actions to help prevent a recurrence of a similar incident. These investigations were overseen by the respective local market Chief Executive, who is responsible for ensuring that the causes of the incident are understood and that any corrective actions are implemented. We also share the lessons learned from each fatality across the relevant Group functions.

Total recordable fatalities

* There is one fatal incidents that are still under investigation and cannot be included in our figures until the local legal proceedings have been completed:

A road traffic fatality reported in Ghana in May 19

High-potential incidents

We track and investigate high-potential incidents (‘HPIs’) – incidents that do not necessarily result in injury but have the potential to do significant harm. During the year, 826 HPIs were recorded, of which 752 involved employees and 74 involved suppliers’ employees or contractors. Each HPI is investigated as an indicator of the potential for a more serious accident.

We seek to identify the root cause and ensure suitable corrective action is taken where necessary. An investigation into an HPI is conducted at a scale proportionate to the indicative level of risk.

Lost-time incidents

Lost Time Incidents (‘LTI’) is the term we use when an employee is injured while carrying out a work related task and is consequently unable to perform his or her regular duties for a complete shift or period of time after the incident. In addition for our suppliers and contractors, we separately track performance measures.

In recent years, we have stepped up our efforts to capture and analyse all incidents of potential or actual harm to our employees. Greater compliance with mandatory rules on reporting incidents enables us to identify emerging trends in operating risks, increasing our scope to intervene and put the necessary controls in place. The total number of reported LTI incidents for 2018/19 was 64. In 2019/20, the total is at 33 for the year to date. Of the 33 incidents, 21 were attributed to slips, trips or falls in and around the workplace; four were vehicle related; while the remaining six incidents comprised assault and manual handling injuries.