- Strategies to cope with the HIV and AIDS factors in your organisations -
Dr Kevin Kelly
Kevin Kelly
Several big businesses are making measurable and effective efforts in the form of strategies to cope with the HIV and AIDS factors in their organisations, notes Dr Kevin Kelly, of Rhodes University. The Director of the Centre for Aids Development Research and Evaluation (CADRE) believes, however, that they are going to have to broaden their initiatives and go beyond the factory walls and office gates.
“There is an urgent need now apparent”, he says, “to extend the education and care offered to workers and other staff members, to the families of those in employment”.
Kelly is engaged in extensive research and while this is still work in progress, some interesting trends and statistics have already emerged.
“HIV travels with people”, he points out. “One can track it along the roads and trading routes of our country. It has been exacerbated by the migrant labour which is part of our industrial character, especially as this has, since the demise of apartheid, become more fragmented”.
Across the whole continent of Africa, Kelly and his research colleagues have found, the situation is further aggravated by the fact that the majority of Africans will, by 2017, be urbanised. Today some 420million Africans are urban dwellers with rural dwellers totaling about 570million. Furthermore, he finds a “second wave of urbanisation, toward the smaller towns. Urban areas make for rapid movement of people and this in turn provokes rapid growth of HIV infections.”
Another factor in the spread of the virus has been found to be the decreasing rate of stable and faithful marriages, Kelly has noted. “And the fact that young people are infected by older people also adds significantly to the figures”, he comments.
The impact of living in urban areas is different in many other ways, Kelly notes. He identifies “Sunday night traffic” as a factor – transport drivers and the thousands of Africans who commute weekly between home and place of employment.
There is also a great deal of movement across economic boundaries. Kelly mentions the ‘sugar-daddy’ relationships embarked upon by many women seeking to enhance their social and economic standing in their communities.
Amongst other factors which make for further negative circumstances Kelly also identifies stigma and depression as contributors. “Knowing that you are HIV positive is very traumatic”, he notes, “so often one does not face up to it”.
Looking ahead, Kelly records that we will continue to face a “very worrying situation” for some time to come. “We cannot predict where it will lead. One only of our country’s mining houses has established that 19%, or about one in five of its employees are HIV-positive. Similar high rates are found in the transport and storage sectors of our economy”, he adds.
“Business must take the lead”, he advises. “It must go into the wider communities.”
The public sector, too, must face up to its responsibilities. “A significant step forward would be to deal with the housing problem. And a reversal of the erosion of family values would contribute immensely to the betterment of the situation”.
“We need to rethink the erosion of marriage in our country and communities”, he says. “What have we done to it”?
