HIV/AIDS is a growing problem in Vietnam. One of the main reasons is the lack of awareness about HIV/AIDS combined with little knowledge about what HIV/AIDS is, how to take your precautions, and how not to stigmatise the victims of this disease. All Danish-Vietnamese companies receiving the B2B programme support are trained in HIV/AIDS awareness at the workplace to meet these awareness challenges.
The HIV/AIDS training seminar at SAVAI was hosted by Patrick Burke, HIV/AIDS consultant, who started the seminar with a Q&A session on HIV/AIDS based on a questionnaire with twenty-two questions on HIV/AIDS. The employees of SAVAI were very eager to participate actively and share their knowledge about HIV/AIDS. Due to a quite humorous way of teaching it was fun for the employees to learn about the serious subject of HIV/AIDS.
To deal with the lack of knowledge and to eradicate some of the existing myths in Vietnam, Patrick Burke had arranged for a woman living with HIV to come visit SAVAI Group. Burke said the reason for inviting an HIV infected person as part of the seminar is because a lot of Vietnamese still believe that only “bad people” get HIV/AIDS, and that you can see if they are infected by their appearance. But by meeting a nice and healthy looking person with HIV you could hopefully remove these prejudices.
The CEO of SAVAI Group, Per Albertsen, was happy to have his employees taught in HIV/AIDS, and he expressed that “SAVAI Group is very committed to taking an active stand against HIV/AIDS, as part of good CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility)”.
