Cosmetics company L’Oreal has won acclaim for an initiative that trains
employees to serve as HIV/Aids ‘educators’ in regions hard-hit by the
disease.
L’Oreal picked up the Award for Business Excellence
from the Global Business Coalition on HIV/Aids for its work in African
countries, in particular South Africa, where it has helped employees
educate hairdressing salon workers who use its products and have direct
contact with the general public.
The alliance of 215
international companies noted that L’Oreal had set up its initiative
even though HIV/Aids affected its business only indirectly. The company
had ‘no direct bottom-line stake in HIV/Aids prevention’, but had
realized that through its supply chain it could ‘capitalize on the fact
that hairdressers enjoy a special level of communication with their
clients’.
L’Oreal says that it regularly reaches two million
hairdressers worldwide and specifically targeted salon owners and
workers. Other corporate winners of GBC awards were:
Unilever Tea Kenya for workplace programmes that have extended HIV/Aids
treatment to cover 100,000 employees and dependants living on the
company’s tea estates US pharmaceuticals company Merck for its partnership with
the
Botswana government’s response to HIV/Aids which has, among other
things, provided clinical training to more than 3200 health care workers
Xstrata coal mining company in South Africa for its efforts to reduce
the stigma of HIV tests among employees and their relatives at ten of
its sites.
