The United States-funded Guyana HIV/AIDS Reduction and Prevention Project (USAID/GHARP) has taken a important step towards consolidating its coalition with the local private sector to respond to the HIV/AIDS crisis by announcing the launch of the new Guyana Business Coalition for HIV/AIDS.
What is perhaps most significant about the launch of the Coalition is that it reflects trhe preparedness of a large and influential section of the local business community to move to the next level – so to speak – by setting up a formal institution to help respond to the HIV/AIDS crisis. The gesture suggests that at least some of the major business houses in Guyana and the movers and shakers in their board rooms are seized of the significance of the threat that HIV/AIDS poses to the business community.
The launch of the new Business Coalition is a logical corollary to the relationship established three years ago between GHARP and sections of the local business community to help provide a private sector dimension to the national HIV/AIDS response. In this context GHARP can take a good deal of credit for helping the private sector forge ahead of the public sector in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Promises of funding from the public treasury to help finance a structured public sector workplace response appear not to have materialized up to this time and while there has been evidence of efforts to establish HIV/AIDS committees at some public sector workplaces the Ministry of Labour itself has admitted that weak workplace Occupational Safety and Health regimes and the seeming indifference – in many cases – of senior public servants to the importance of workplace programmes have militated against effective HIV/AIDS workplace initiatives. Last year. For example, local Occupational Safety and Health officials quietly expressed their disappointment over the fact that that senior public officers had all but boycotted what was intended to be an important policy-related forum of HIV/AIDS and the workplace, opting instead to be represented by functionaries at the level of Administrative Assistant and Accounts Clerk.
Where the GHRAP initiative differs is that it has been able to get the attention of some of the ‘captains of industry.’ Some of the key leaders of the business community who can influence a WIDER private sector response at the levels of organizations like the Private Sector Commission and the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry, umbrella organizations who members include many of the country’s small and medium-sized businesses who employees will benefit from structured HIV/AIDS workplace programmes.
