One of the aims of the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA) – an organization representing about 200 American companies investing in Africa – is to help its members develop and implement workplace HIV/Aids policies and programs. It also supports national business coalitions against HIV/Aids and facilitates private sector leadership in fighting the disease.
Victor Barnes, director of the CCA's HIV/Aids initiative, helped create a resource pool for members to initiate partnerships between members and other organizations, such as nongovernmental organizations, implementing agencies in the donor community, the World Bank and even AllAfrica. He spoke with Cindy Shiner recently:
A report in 2005 from the World Economic Forum said businesses in Africa, Asia and Russia were moving too slowly in tackling Aids and helping prevent its damaging fallout. Have companies in Africa picked up the pace?
It continues to be an ongoing issue with business. HIV/Aids carries with it a certain stigma.
I think it's really important when we talk about the private sector to look at the various degrees of the corporate sector – if we start with the multinational corporations, there are a couple of things that impede their engagement around this issue. It has to do with companies having nothing to do with health, not wanting to take on a health issue. There's this fear that once you engage in the provision of services for your employees, you have gone down a path of a long-term commitment to a health program.
What we try to do is create public-private partnerships that allow businesses to do what they do and to use their capacity to convene, to educate workers on site and to link workers to services. So you create an environment that makes it easy for the corporate sector to do the right thing.
There are numerous companies – whether they be pharmaceuticals, De Beers or Standard Bank or Heineken, or other major companies like Shell – that have gone the extra mile and initiated their own workplace programs. Those are the kinds of businesses that have the economic wherewithal actually to create clinics, hospitals, service-delivery mechanisms within their own health and wellness programs. The number of companies that can do that is fairly limited.
The second-tier companies… are smaller, medium-sized companies that need partnerships. If you look at a brewery or bottler like Coca-Cola they have a core staff but the bread and butter of the business depends on the supply chain to deliver. The question is, how do you engage them to deliver services to their contract staff and then retail outlets?
In the past three or four years the private sector has become much more engaged. I think part of that is being driven by the public sector and its recognition that these kinds of partnerships are a win-win for everybody. Part of it is the simple fact that when you start to talk about access to treatment and the infrastructure required to deliver services beyond the urban centers, the private sector has a real edge in its capacity to use its supply chain and some of its other capacity to help the public sector actually to deliver those goods. [It also can] do that in conjunction with civil society, with NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and CVOs (citizen voluntary organizations).
Tell us more about how second-tier businesses, those smaller than multinationals, address HIV/Aids.
The difficult group to reach is small- to medium-sized enterprises. They have far fewer resources. Businesses with 200 employees or less really are not able to do much more than to create a policy and an awareness of HIV and Aids… and potentially [to promote] peer education around the poor for seeking counseling and testing and services.
When you start to talk about access to treatment you really have to begin to look at ways to create resource pools for those kinds of businesses. One thing we have been doing in conjunction with the World Bank and with the World Economic Forum, UNAIDS and the GBC (Global Business Coalition) is… to support business coalitions. There are now 28 across Africa and a pan-African business coalition based in South Africa.
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Those bodies represent many different variations of coalitions that really are compilations of the private sector developed to speak in one voice for the private sector and to interact quite directly with national Aids commissions to try and look for ways to create active partnerships between the public and the private sector. The impetus for doing that… is not only to speak with a cohesive and coherent voice, but also to create opportunities for pooling resources and creation of opportunities for small- and medium-sized enterprises.
In terms of corporate responsibility, are there any oversight groups looking at health as a human right?
We work with ICCR (the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility). They have a very interesting function. They raise issues online and then allow business to respond. They're about awareness-raising. They've been very successful at getting business to move on issues under the radar screen… and creating dialogue with activists.
