Behinan Guede, ANADER's CEO

Behinan Guede, ANADER's CEO, explains why the rural development agency has set up an HIV solidarity fund for its employees

Why did you decide to offer an HIV program for your employees?
I did it to save human resources, which are vital for our company. If our employees are not in good health, they can't do the work they have been trained to do. Our agricultural technicians and advisors have fifteen years of experience on average.

Each year, approximately thirty of our employees based in rural villages die from AIDS. 1800 out of 2500 of our employees are based in villages throughout the Ivory Coast.

Each year we lose an average of 30 employees from malaria and diseases associated with HIV such as tuberculosis.

We decided we needed to speak out about HIV rather than treating it as a taboo subject.

When you first began the program, did you have employees' families in mind?
We were first interested in our employees since at first we didn't have a budget to look after their families. But now, with the drop in ARV prices in the country as of June 2004, we have been able to extend our initiative to employees' family members since October 2004. ANADER now has a team of social assistants in place whose job is to liaise with employees' families and provide support to them. Our social workers will encourage family members to take the voluntary HIV test.

It's only natural that we take care of the families of our employees. After all, our employees go to work everyday for their families.

The average size of an ANADER employee's family is ten people. ANADER has 2500 employees. So we are now extending our support to a community of approximately 25,000 people.

How did you come up with the idea of the HIV solidarity fund?
CFA ($17,469) to the fund and ANADER contributes 5,000,000 CFA ($9,705) to this general fund to cover employees'  health cost not covered by insurance. So the HIV fund was a natural extension of this fund already in place. We decided we couldn't wait for the disease to come to us.

The idea of a solidarity fund works since solidarity is a central part of African culture. Take the example of funerals in the Ivory Coast. An average funeral in the Ivory Coast costs two million CFA ($3,882). This includes the cost of transport for people to and from a village, food to feed everyone, and the cost of the coffin. A coffin costs 150,000 CFA ($291) and that's not a very expensive one. More pricey coffins can run up to 300,000 CFA ($582). It is also a tradition in our culture to sacrifice male cows to feed everyone who comes to the funeral since male cows are a sign of wealth. When someone passes away in a family, family members and friends come together and help pay for these different costs associated with the funeral.

ANADER's HIV fund is based on the same kind of solidarity. Employees chip in to help cover the health needs of their fellow colleagues.

We hope to apply a similar HIV solidarity fund to rural villages. Planters do not have regular salaries like ANADER employees but they do have access to micro-finance accounts and they can contribute money during the harvest period for cocoa and coffee, between October and March. We are confident the model will work in villages as well.

How has Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD) helped ANADER?
We appreciate MSD's contribution. We first met MSD at the International Aids conference in Barcelona in July 2002. Since then, it has sponsored the training of our company doctor in ARV treatment, assisted us with the writing of our strategic plan to present to potential donors and provided us key contacts to help move our project forward. And all of this at no cost to us.

Latest information: ANADER was awarded $4 million over 4 years by PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), on September 15, 2005 to cover the first stage of its HIV/AIDS program for rural areas. See press release.