Vivo Energy, the company that distributes and markets Shell branded fuels and lubricants in Africa, held its annual Safety Day today, with a focus on preventing safety incidents from happening.

The theme for last year’s Safety Day - “See it, report it, prevent it” - encouraged employees, contractors and partners to develop a culture of identifying and reporting potential incidents (PIs) so that mitigation plans can be activated and incidents prevented from happening.

Feedback from colleagues was very positive and significantly more potential incidents were reported in 2016 compared to the previous year, helping contribute to our outstanding HSSE performance in 2016.

Following this success we have built on the important PI reporting theme again this year to reinforce the culture of potential incident reporting across our business. Throughout the year we have been:

• Encouraging employees and contractors to continue to report potential incidents, ensuring that we do not become complacent, so that we can equal or better our 2016 HSSE performance.

• Improving the quality of potential incident report submissions.

• Ensuring that potential incident reports are acted on, so that the company truly learns from potential incident reporting.

• Providing feedback to employees and contractors who raise high quality PIs and recognition for the best PIs.

Commenting on Safety Day James Ngethi, Head of HSSE, Vivo Energy said: “Safety remains an integral and essential part of everything we do and is a top priority for our business, our staff and our contractors. Our annual safety day is a moment for all our teams to stop; reflect on safety issues; and ensure that we are doing everything that we can to achieve our aim of ‘Goal Zero’ - no harm to people or the environment.”

Vivo Energy’s commitment to achieving and maintaining the highest international Health, Safety, Security and Environment (HSSE) standards is at the heart of its business and in 2016 the company delivered a particularly strong safety performance with a TRCF (total recordable case frequency) of 0.31. We are on track for an even better performance in 2017.

Ngethi added: “Vivo Energy has a very strong safety record, but there is always more that can be done, and we must never become complacent. We recognise that the key to great HSSE leadership is identifying and fixing potential incidents before they become actual incidents. We did a good job of reporting potential incidents last year, and by continuing that focus in 2017 we have already exceeded our annual PI reporting target (16,500 PIs reported in 2017) with 18,201 PIs reported in August. We will work hard to achieve our HSSE goals in order to make continued progress to become recognised as Africa’s most respected energy business.”

Safety Day activity included town hall meetings for employees; recognition of employees who have reported high-quality potential incidents; safety quizzes; road safety education courses; and ‘safety walks’ to ensure sites and service stations were operating safely.

In Ghana, the day was marked by series of mind boggling and energy driven activities including a safety town hall engagement, quiz and potential incidents arts competition.

The Managing Director of Vivo Energy Ghana, Mr. Ebenezer Faulkner said the theme for the event generates the safety passion that Vivo Energy puts into its business.

‘For us at Vivo Energy, safety is our licence to operate and we will ensure that safety is embedded in all our operations to safeguard people, environment, assets and reputation’, says Mr Faulkner.