Big SAfrican firms to help smaller ones fight AIDS
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An initiative to expand testing and treatment of HIV-infected workers in mid-sized companies in South Africa was launched on Friday, to help fight a disease affecting one in nine people in the country.
Big companies, which run successful in-house HIV/AIDS testing and treatment facilities and pay for their workers’ life-prolonging drugs, have teamed up with the World Economic Forum (WEF) to try to offer similar care to smaller businesses.
The smaller firms, which supply them with various services and products, have been found to have little if any formal ways of coping with AIDS, yet they employ the bulk of workers in Africa’s biggest economy, officials said.
South African unit of carmaker Volkswagen, Unilever, and state power utility Eskom are among the companies working with WEF’s Global Health Initiative to try to expand HIV/AIDS care to their suppliers.
“Without our suppliers, we simply wouldn’t be able to function,” said Penny Mkalipe, Eskom’s Health & Wellness head.
The project, which will see the big companies finance AIDS testing, counselling, awareness campaigns and treatment of infected workers in the smaller businesses, would be assessed in early 2006 to determine its impact, said Francesca Boldrini, Director of the WEF’s Global Health Initiative.
Small and medium-sized firms provide more than 55 percent of all South African jobs, the African Development Bank has said.
The country struggles with the world’s biggest caseload of HIV/AIDS in the world with about 6.5 million out of a population of around 47 million people infected.
Only half of small business owners in the country had a formal strategy to tackle AIDS, and over a third of those had no one to oversee the policy, the Grant Thornton 2005 Business Owners Survey issued in April showed.
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