- Author
- De Young, Peter
- Title
- Integrating HIV/AIDS Prevention Into Existing Induction and Health and Safety Training Programmes: Private Sector Intervention Case Example
- Editor
- World Economic Forum
- Imprint
- World Economic Forum, December 2003, 5 pp
- Description
Case categories: Company: PT Ricky Putra Globalindo (RPG); Industry: Retail & Consumer; Location: Indonesia; Programme: HIV / AIDS. Reproduced with the World Economic Forum's kind permission.
- Abstract
"PT Ricky Putra Globalindo (RPG) is a leading domestic supplier of undergarments to Indonesia’s population of 235 million people. In 2002 RPG generated US$ 110 million in revenues and employed approximately 3,850 people. The company has approximately 3,500 employees in a factory located on the outskirts of Jakarta, Indonesia, and employs approximately 350 sales promotion agents in major retail outlets throughout Indonesia. RPG started a workplace HIV/AIDS prevention programme because it believes that its employees risk contracting HIV/AIDS and that prevention is so cost effective that it will pay for itself after averting a single HIV infection. RPG believes that its employees risk contracting sexually transmitted infections, including HIV/AIDS. 90% of RPG factory employees are recent migrants to Jakarta. The majority of the staff is young women between the ages of 19 and 24. These women come from rural areas and have completed, at most, a junior high school education. These women are frequently living away from home for the first time in their lives. Free of family and social constraints, they often become sexually active with migrant male workers from nearby
factories. RPG management became aware of the rapidly emerging HIV/AIDS epidemic in Indonesia through public seminars arranged by Family Health International and the International Labour Organization. The company management realized that its employees were at risk mainly because of two reasons, highlighted by government statistics: (1) 95% of the 90,000 to 130,000 estimated HIV/AIDS cases in Indonesia occur among individuals in their prime productive years, between the age 19 to 49; (2) nearly 60% of new infections in
Indonesia are occurring among migrant workers and their partners."