Coca-Cola announced this summer that it would collaborate with UNAIDS in a treatment program aimed at preventing new HIV infections in Africa.
For most businesses, treatment and prevention of HIV and AIDS has practical as well as moral significance.
Because it affects workers in their most productive years, AIDS can be particularly devastating to a business’s work force as well as a country’s economy.
“From a micro business perspective, [investing in AIDS treatment] makes sense because of the productivity issue,” said Diana Barrett, Senior Lecturer at the Business School, who helped to organize the conference. “It’s good to keep your workers alive.”
Barrett added that AIDS creates high rates of absenteeism among employees, who must leave work to care for infected family members and attend funerals. Many companies have to train three or four employees just to keep one.
Workshop organizers described another set of challenges posed by countries such as China and India, which Ruggie said are “on an African trajectory, just fifteen years behind.”
Ruggie said businesses in these countries have an opportunity to take a leading role because their governments have not yet begun to address the waves of infection that experts predict.
“Businesses won’t solve this problem by themselves,” Ruggie said, “but it’s the secondary impact of companies’ involvement that’s important. If businesses demonstrate that this can be done, it will be a big encouragement to governments.”
Some companies, such as Coca-Cola, have been criticized by activists for not developing enough prevention strategies for future waves of the epidemic.
And Piot added that one aim of the first round of conferences was to encourage large companies to be leaders.
“You need champions,” he said, “before you can get many more players.”
According to information provided at the conference, 42 million people globally are infected with HIV/AIDS.
In South Africa, one out of five adults is infected, and, at current rates, between 10 to 15 million people in China and 20 to 25 million people in India will have contracted the disease by 2010.
Inspiration for the conference came from two graduate students: Samantha N. Bolton, a recent graduate of the Kennedy School and Daniella Ballou, who received a joint degree from the Kennedy and Business Schools in 2002.
The two collaborators enlisted Ruggie and Barrett of the Business School to help them organize the conference, find funding and attract high profile participants.
“They parked in my office and threatened not to leave until we did this,” Ruggie said.
Bolton said she was pleased with the outcome of her efforts.
“It shows that students can actually do stuff,” she said. “It took a few months, but if you find the right professor, it will work.”