Overview

Since 2021, International SOS has been providing health and security support to the employees of a global chemical company, who have been travelling frequently to Lagos, Nigeria. The company, at a global level, already has an ongoing Workforce Resilience subscription with us.

Problem

The company needed to send their team of international assignees on business trips of up to four weeks duration to their client’s refinery, located on the outskirts of Lagos. Despite the employees being frequent and experienced travellers, this was their first time travelling to this region. As such, they required support in conducting on-the-ground health and security risk assessments, and in implementing the appropriate mitigation measures to protect their workforce and business continuity.

As the organisation wanted to ensure that they meet their duty of care obligations towards their people, they reached out to International SOS to help their employees be prepared before, during and after the travel, from both a health and security perspective.

Solution

International SOS’ health and security experts devised a tailor-made health and security support plan for our client’s visiting teams during their project lifecycle in Nigeria. We began by conducting a full health and security risk assessment of the project and accommodation sites. We also developed bespoke project security protocols, to mitigate the identified key security risks and a medical emergency response protocol was put in place in case of any medical incident. To ensure traveller compliance and risk awareness, International SOS provided security trainings to our client’s team. Furthermore, we supported them with advice on pre-deployment health reviews including essential vaccines and malaria prevention, COVID-19 pre-travel and recommendations to ensure they were compliant with local regulations.

Impact

Besides benefiting from our global 24/7 assistance services via their Workforce Resilience subscription, the team had the necessary in-country support to assess and actively manage threats they could face in Nigeria. They were able to understand the Nigerian environment better from both a medical and security perspective and knew what to do in the event of an emergency. Our comprehensive approach also helped our client feel more supported with their duty of care obligations as an employer and allowed their management team to ensure their business continuity.