One can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that busy business executives are usually preoccupied with ensuring that their outfits are efficiently managed, that employees continually deliver what is expected of them and that, at the end of the day, the outcome is an organization that yields a profit. These preoccupations sometimes create a culture of tunnel vision, within organizations, a culture that sets most things – apart from productivity and profitability – to one side.
One of the many impacts that the advent of HIV/ AIDS has had on the global business community has been the creation of an enhanced awareness of the nexus between productivity and profitability and the welfare of employees. The sheer scale of the malady coupled with the fact that it respects no social class, no industry, no workplace, has seen to that.
HIV/AIDS as a workplace issue has not always been taken seriously in Guyana. Time was, when important meetings to discuss the issue and to address responses thereto were, in many cases, attended by relatively low-level employees, the assumption being that the ‘big-wigs’ had far more important business to attend to. Time was, too, when it was assumed that the business of responding to the challenge of HIV/AIDS was solely the business of the state.
Though some might argue that there is need for an even greater attitudinal change, some change has occurred. Combating HIV/AIDS requires a collective response and that response cannot exclude the private sector.
The Guyana Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS (GBCHA) continues to make an eminent case for the importance of the private sector in the national response to HIV/AIDS. Just how seriously the Coali-tion takes itself is reflected in the fact that its Board includes some of the very top executives of prominent business organizations and, more importantly, that the outcomes of its efforts are real, tangible and measurable. If the expectation that private sector organizations will be most effective in raising money, the Coalition has gone well beyond that, planning and effecting noteworthy workplace programme, committing their premises and other resources to HIV/AIDS testing programmes, extending their initiatives into the communities that they serve and supporting the planning and execution of national and regional HIV/AIDS fora.
These initiatives reflect a sense of mission by an organization that is seized of the very essence of the HIV/AIDS challenge, that is, that their productivity and their profits cannot be sustained inside cocoons of isolationism driven by the notion that the disease is someone else’s business. It is, in a sense, a sobering lesson for a local private sector, which, in some cases, has been unmindful of its responsibilities both to its own employees and to the communities that it serves. Perhaps the signal contribution which the GBCHA continues to make reposes in its role in the creation of a deeper private sector awareness of that unbreakable link between its pursuit of profitability and the welfare of the workers and the communities that make their accomplishments possible.
