UNAIDS: The First 10 Years

Chapter 3Establishing the broad coalition65One of UNAIDS’ major objectives was to work with a broad coalition of people and organizationsinvolved with HIV/AIDS. During 1995, strong links had been made with nongovernmentalorganizations, community-based organizations and networks of people living withHIV. Now UNAIDS began to reach out to other players in civil society.In 1996, Cowal began making contacts with religious bodies, including the Vatican. Theapproach to the Roman Catholic Church was through the UK-based nongovernmental organization,the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development which laid out the roadmap for Cowaland recommended an approach to Caritas Internationalis, a confederation of more than 160Catholic development and social service organizations ‘working to build a better world, especiallyfor the poor and oppressed in over 200 countries and territories, and an organizationthat promotes partnership’ 14 . Cowal and Piot had at least two meetings with Cardinal LozanoBarragan, President of the Pontifical Commission for Pastoral Care, during these two years. AsCowal explained, they argued that, even if the church continued to say that an artificial meansof contraception should not be used, “there’s a greater good out there and if the condomcan be used as life-saving, that’s the greater good. … But we could never quite get there”.However, in the following years, UNAIDS worked closely with a range of faith-based organizations.During that time, with the Catholic Church as with others, there has been far greateropenness and dialogue.More down-to-earth debates were held with the business community than with faith-basedgroups. A small but growing number of major corporations, especially in southern Africa,had begun to recognize the potential seriousness of the epidemic’s impact on their work– both on employee productivity and on their markets. A study of African enterprises foundthat HIV-related absenteeism accounted for 37% of increased labour costs 15 .By the mid-1990s, the Uganda Railway Corporation had an annual employee turnover rate of15%. There were suggestions that more than 10% of its workforce had died from AIDS-relatedillnesses 16 . In South Africa, the electricity utility company Eskom had pioneered workplaceHIV prevention programmes in the late 1980s. In 1995, the company’s Chief Medical officer,Charles Roos, instituted a surveillance study of HIV within Eskom. This indicated that, withoutany interventions, about 25% of the workforce would be HIV-positive by 2003 17 .14Caritas website, 2007.15Coutinho A G (2000). An Assessment of the Economic Impact of HIV/AIDS on the Royal Swaziland SugarCorporation. MA research report, Department of Community Health, University of the Witswatersrand,Johannesburg.16Barnett A, Whiteside A (2002). AIDS in the Twenty-First Century. Disease and Globalization. New York, PalgraveMacmillan.17Knight L (2005). Access to Treatment in the Private Sector Workplace. Best Practice Collection. Geneva,UNAIDS.