Advancing Occupational Health and Safety Management Theory for Nigeria’s Informal Manufacturing Sector

This dissertation advances occupational health and safety management theory for application in Nigeria's informal manufacturing sector, developing an original theoretical framework that recognises the structural, institutional, and cultural characteristics of informal production environments that render conventional occupational safety management models inapplicable. Nigeria's informal manufacturing sector, encompassing foundries, metalworking workshops, garment producers, and food processing operations employing an estimated fifteen million workers across the country's urban and peri-urban areas, exhibits occupational fatality and injury rates substantially higher than the formal manufacturing sector, yet it is effectively invisible to the formal occupational health and safety management literature and regulatory system. The research employs a transformative mixed-methods design informed by critical realism, combining large-scale occupational injury surveillance data analysis for informal manufacturing workers in Aba, Kano, Lagos, and Kaduna with participatory action research at twelve informal manufacturing communities over eighteen months. Original theoretical contributions include the Informal Manufacturing Safety Ecology model, which reconceptualises occupational safety in informal settings as a product of community social norms, inter-firm social networks, and shared physical infrastructure rather than organisational management systems. A community-based participatory safety intervention framework is developed and pilot-tested, demonstrating a thirty-eight percent reduction in recordable injuries across participating communities over twelve months. Keywords: occupational safety management, informal manufacturing, participatory action research, transformative methodology, Nigeria