Bangladesh labour inspectorate rolls out digitalized system to monitor all industries
Since January 2019, all 23 field offices of the Department of Inspection for Factories and Establishments (DIFE) have been using LIMA for all inspections and licensing needs. Six inspection checklists that DIFE uses to monitor compliance in different industries have been integrated in LIMA.
The LIMA system has been developed by the ILO’s Ready-Made Garment (RMG) programme, which is funded by the governments of Canada, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
As part of the roll-out and adoption scheme of this platform, nine LIMA Master Trainers were trained to deliver ‘refresher’ training to 280 DIFE labour inspectors (one in five of whom are women) working at the field level.
As a result of the LIMA training and roll-out, 9,732 DIFE inspections (234 reactive) were conducted in 2019. This is over 40 times more than the number of inspections carried out in 2018. Additionally, DIFE provided 306 new licences and renewed 80 licences via LIMA.
Speaking at an ILO LIMA workshop in Khulna last year, Inspector General of DIFE, Mr Shibnath Roy declared that from 1 January 2020, all labour inspections will be conducted on this digital platform.
Borhan Uddin, Knowledge Management Officer of ILO Bangladesh, said: “DIFE has established a dedicated LIMA support team to provide prompt and real-time technical support to its LIMA users. The team liaises with DIFE’s field offices regularly and uses social media platforms to resolve issues raised by the users. Such close follow-ups have led to the increased use of the digital platform.”
LIMA has been widely acclaimed as a ‘good practice tool’ at a number of international conferences, including the Labour Inspection Academy in Turin, Italy and the GIZ sponsored Regional Exchange Workshop on Labour Inspection held in Cambodia in October 2019.
The ILO’s RMG programme continues to work with DIFE to utilise LIMA for inspections in all industrial sectors in Bangladesh.