3 - Healthy Responses

Summary

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Southern Africa is perhaps the world’s deadliest. Again, despite highly contrasting responses by the national governments of South African and Botswana respectively, there were significant similarities in how the private sector actors in these two countries responded to that epidemic. While many (if not most) firms provided little by way of a constructive response to the epidemic, a number of high-profile firms, notably within the mining and financial subsectors, rolled out a variety of remarkably constructive responses to the epidemic, programmes that at their most comprehensive included the provision of free antiretroviral drugs to their staff, and support for broader societal initiatives to combat the epidemic.