Botswana Business Coalition on Aids (BBCA) was named the best Non-Governmental Organisation at the recently ended 27th Business Botswana Northern Trade Fair, which was held in Francistown last week.

BBCA was founded in 2005 to oversee and coordinate the private sector’s response to HIV/AIDS by designing and executing excellent HIV/AIDS programmes, including the establishment and implementation of HIV/AIDS policies in the workplace.
As the national HIV/AIDS response evolved, BBCA chose to widen its services to the private sector, and it now manages and coordinates private sector responses to a variety of illnesses including non-communicable diseases (NCDs), malaria, tuberculosis (TB), and the recent covid-19 outbreak.

BBCA accomplishes this by assisting private-sector enterprises in designing and updating workplace health and wellness policies that are most beneficial to employees.
Any registered business or individuals, regardless of size, sector, or regional footprint, that wishes to be involved in addressing the Covid-19, HIV/AIDS, TB, Malaria, and Non-Communicable Diseases and is interested in providing a creative, enabling, and healthy workplace environment can become a member for a fee based on the number of employees.

Individual subscription is P 250. OO, zero to ten employees cost P 550.00, 11- 50 employees cost P 1100,00.51-100 employees cost P 1725.00, 111 – 500 employees cost P 2300, while more than 500 employees cost P 3450.00.

In an interview, the BBCA Executive Director, Frank Phatshwane said that the trade fair in general and the experience at the trade fair specifically were successful because they allowed them to network with as many organisations as possible. 

“The fair was a success, we made ourselves available to a lot of companies, some of which we were unaware of, and we also made ourselves available to companies that we could not reach due to distance, thus, the trade fair allowed us to get closer to those organisations,” said Phatshwane.

The theme of this year’s Northern Trade Fair was “promoting economic growth through industrialisation.”
Addressing the theme, BBCA manager said that employees must be healthy in order to produce results and be efficient in order to promote economic growth through industrialization.

“You cannot separate industrialisation from labour; for employees to be active and generate income for their organisation, they must be healthy; therefore, as BBCA, we promote economic growth by ensuring companies have set the right policies in place that will make an employee’s working environment conducive for them to continue to work and grow the country’s economy,” Phatshwane concluded.