Occupational safety and health country profile: Papua New Guinea

International labour standards

  1. NORMLEX

    Ratification of ILO conventions

    Database on international labour standards

    Provides access to the latest information on ILO international labour standards on OSH (such as ratification information, reporting requirements, comments of the ILO's supervisory bodies, etc.).

Laws and regulations

  1. NATLEX

    National legislation

    National labour legislation database

    Includes abstracts of OSH legislation and citation information. Full text of laws or a relevant source is linked to the records, when available.

Authorities and bodies

  1. Responsible authorities

    1. Ministry for Labour and Industrial Relations

Statistics

  1. ILOSTAT

    Occupational injuries

    Database of labour statistics

    Contains annual data collected through the ILO yearly questionnaire, which covers a wide range of topics including OSH indicators.

Technical cooperation

South South Cooperation Initiatives in the Pacific
In April 2011, the Governments of Fiji and Papua New Guinea (PNG) entered into a landmark technical cooperation program. This program was intended to improve the standards and practices in the workplace in relation to occupational safety and health (OSH).

Fiji would assist PNG in reviewing and updating its OSH legislation, systems, structures, and capacities. A Memorandum of Understanding was signed between these two countries to make use of Fiji’s longer term expertise in this area and provide to PNG training and other capacity building activities to improve OSH legislation and compliance. The role of the ILO was to facilitate the discussions between the two governments.

As a result of sharing between the two countries, PNG hoped to develop:
  • a new OSH legislation, together with a number of regulations and policies;
  • a new OSH framework; a new OSH structure that is economically driven;
  • an OSH Trust Account; well-equipped and trained OSH technical inspectors;
  • and OSH shifting from a programme to an authority within the Ministry of Labour.
The agreement with Fiji is in line with the recently adopted Pacific Plan of Action on Decent Work, which calls for Pacific islands and countries to share their expertise. In this case, PNG’s labour reforms will benefit from Fiji’s experience in this area.