HIV and AIDS
Strategies to Mitigate Effects of HIV, Expand Economic Growth and Food Security
The impact of HIV and AIDS on poverty throughout the world is well-known. Disease related to HIV and AIDS is the world’s sixth largest killer (WHO). The economic and social impacts of HIV and AIDS negate, and even undo, hard-won development gains, hindering economic growth and destroying families and communities.
HIV Hinders Economic Growth
The link between economic growth and HIV prevalence is both commonsensical and proven.
A healthy workforce is essential to building and maintaining competitive industries in today’s global marketplace. The debilitating effects of HIV—as well as other preventable diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis—have a tremendous effect on worker productivity, especially in developing communities where approximately 90 percent of wages are earned from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
HIV and AIDS not only undermine worker productivity, but also divert cash incomes from business-related investments, which impedes private sector growth. In some countries in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, between 15 percent and 40 percent of the workforce has HIV or AIDS, resulting in lower worker productivity, frequent employee absences and overall reduced investment in productive assets like training because cash income is diverted to pay for other expenses like health care and burials.
HIV Weakens Food Security
Another consequence of HIV and AIDS, especially in rural communities, is food insecurity because of labor-related food shortages.
In Africa alone, more than 7 million farmers have died of AIDS-related illnesses since 1985.
Not only do these communities suffer from lost agricultural labor, but in many places the younger generation has lost its mentors, and with them, the farming techniques and knowledge needed to grow food.
The result: a downward hunger-poverty spiral. Agricultural production drops sharply. Children are pulled from school to provide farm labor. Agricultural inputs and crop and animal maintenance are stinted because the younger farmers do not know what to do and/or do not have the money needed to take appropriate action. Livestock is sold off and loans are defaulted.
ACDI/VOCA Strategies
Development initiatives directed toward economic growth and food security, regardless of the sector, must find ways to overcome the devastating effects of HIV on competitive economic capacity. As a responsible, client-oriented organization with a long-held commitment to broad-based economic development, ACDI/VOCA is dedicated to being proactive in the fight against HIV.
At the heart of our comprehensive approach to HIV mitigation and economic growth, we:
- introduce appropriate technologies that substitute for increasingly scarce labor
- design innovative financial products that enable poorer people to purchase those technologies
- implement creative strategies like our Farming as a Business training in Uganda to help individuals and pro-poor businesses compensate for lower productivity.
ACDI/VOCA also promotes the use of value chain analysis as a tool for identifying and prioritizing constraints to better industry performance, where bottlenecks and inefficiencies impede the capacity of an industry to respond to market demands. Participatory value chain tools can be used to mobilize industry stakeholders to address health-related constraints and create solutions to make their industries more competitive.
Strategies to maximize private sector competitiveness can be a major complement to donor activities aimed at preventing and mitigating the impact of AIDS-related and other diseases. Private sector firms have the potential to increase income opportunities for poorer people who are able to work, while accessing donor funds for public programs to provide a safety net of social and economic benefits for those who are not able to work.
As such, ACDI/VOCA seeks to collaborate with public and private sector partners in the implementation of educational, treatment, nutritional supplementation and health care finance programs.
