Tourism & agric sectors participate in HIV/AIDS workshops

This week the International Labour Organization and the U.S. Department of Labour HIV/AIDS Workplace Education Programme continued with presentations to the tourism and agriculture sectors. The workshop seeks to achieve a behaviour change communication strategy that the respective companies will be able to use in their workplaces.

Sheila Middleton, Coordinator, Workplace Education Prog.
?These are specific strategies of how the information will be relayed to the persons in the workplace. So each company, for example we have people participating from Belize Sugar Industry, at the end of this workshop there will be a draft workplace programme, and within that it has specific areas of training that they have identified based on the formative assessment that we did. What we did was that we had all the companies under the agriculture sector, we selected some of them and we went into these organisations and we interviewed people and find out their behaviours, their attitudes, their practices and some of the things that they would like to see in the workplace. And based on that, the additional people that came from BSI, they are helping us develop that programme for their workplace.?

Middleton says when you look at the statistics for HIV and AIDS, it’s the productive sector that is being most affected. The programme continues later this month with workshops for the service sector which includes utilities, sanitation, and banking.