Seven major international companies have joined forces with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to boost prevention and treatment of HIV infection and AIDS among their workers and their families in Asia and Africa.
The initiative, dubbed the global business coalition, comes after years of companies seeing their workforces decimated by the killer disease, and it won praise from US health secretary Tommy Thompson, who was in Nairobi for its official launch last Wednesday.
The companies involved are South Africa's electrical utility Eskom, the mining group Anglo American, the US oil giant Chevron Texaco, the US-German automobile group DaimlerChrysler, the Dutch brewer Heineken, the French construction firm Lafarge, and India's Tata Steel. The companies said they would use their facilities to expand HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention in the workplace.
"They will pitch in to cover the workers, and we will cover the community—that way we leverage their money and they leverage ours," Jon Liden, spokesman for the Geneva based fund, said, adding that the companies would submit proposals by January 2004 for specific projects to be funded jointly with the fund.
It was the latest so called public-private partnership created to address neglected health problems of the developing world—the subject of a conference in Geneva last week, organised by the Global Forum for Health Research.
These alliances, many of which have sprung up in recent years, are playing a vital role in reducing the "10-90" gap, where only 10% of health research funding is spent on 90% of the world's health problems, said Louis Currat, head of the forum.
"AIDS in Africa not only means instability and a tremendous loss of income and people in the labour force but it also means that the economic partners of Africa suffer," said Mr Currat, a former World Bank economist. "Africa would be a better economic partner if its economy were growing and it were buying more products."
Currat warned that health problems such as AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis contributed to poverty, instability, and violence, which in turn trigger migration and a need for humanitarian aid—both of which could be costly for Western countries in the long run.
Roy Widdus, head of the Geneva based initiative on public-private partnerships for health, said there were already more than 50 such alliances combining public and private means to combat the diseases associated with poverty.
One of the most famous examples to date is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which recently donated $200m (£116m; €165m) to the National Institutes for Health to research vaccines, drugs, and treatments for neglected diseases and health problems.