Making the Business of AIDS everybody’s business
The 21st International AIDS Conference, which takes place in Durban from 18 to 22 July, is a milestone for the global movement against the AIDS pandemic.
The conference reminds us of the momentous AIDS Summit held in 2000, where a call for a more concerted response to HIV/AIDS was made.
Those beginning years of the millennium were challenging, as the scourge of HIV/AIDS was placing pressure on the global health system, and challenging ‘big business’ to come up with a rapid and sustainable response.
Things have changed since then, with infection rates going down and governments, the private sector, and civil society, working together to ensure global access to ARVs and other care and prevention programmes.
But the work is not done.
Here are three reflections we wish to share — all of which are drawn from Anglo American’s 30-year experience as a company that has been a private-sector pioneer in the holistic response to the pandemic.
Firstly, we viewed HIV/AIDS as a business imperative:
By the late 1990s we accepted that we had a problem, as mining was the industry worst-affected by the pandemic. With an average of about 121,000 employees through the 1990s, the pandemic was ‘staring us in the face.’
This challenged us to think of the scourge not only in moral, but also in business terms, as people are the greatest economic and developmental asset for any community, business, and economy, at a macro scale. The pandemic was threatening to retard economic development.
Secondly, we set up well-structured and sustainable programmes:
- In 1986 we launched an education and awareness programme aimed at our workforce, and also provided more than $5 million in funding to researchers in Europe and the US to investigate HIV-treatment possibilities.
- By 1990, we were the first South African company to develop a human rights-based HIV/AIDS policy, which ensured that there was no discrimination against any person living with HIV.
- By 2002, we were lauded as a company with the world’s largest free HIV/AIDS workplace voluntary counseling, testing and treatment programme.
- The efforts of our business units in building innovative healthcare facilities, have helped facilitate the treatment and management of HIV/AIDS and other diseases.
And thirdly, the only way we will end the scourge of AIDS by 2030 is by forming cross-sector partnerships, similar to those formed in the early 2000s:
Greater private sector involvement in the fight against AIDS should not exclude participation by government and civil society, as all the milestones that have been reached in the fight against AIDS have been reached through cross-sector collaboration.
This is an opportune time to reinvigorate the effort, which is why we have partnered with UNAIDS on a global campaign aimed at encouraging our corporate peers, governments, and ordinary citizens to think more purposefully about their contributions to ending the HIV scourge by 2030.
I want to encourage you all to visit protesthiv.org to learn more about our collaboration with UNAIDS, and get involved to end AIDS by 2030.
The collaboration supports UNAIDS’s #ProTESTHIV campaign aimed at creating awareness and inspiring people to know their HIV status, to spread the word and to get involved.