Report

Walking the Talk in the Workplace – Scaling up Initiatives for Managing HIV and AIDS at Workplaces in Tanzania

This study was aimed at generating relevant data which relates to the status of HIV and AIDS workplace policy formulation and implementation for participating organisations for informing the Up scaling Project on Managing HIV in workplaces in Tanzania under the support of Oxfam Novib. Key findings indicate that, there is high acceptance of HIV positive staff by both management and other staff although only few organisations have been able to operationalize their HIV workplace policies contributing to limited availability of grievances procedures for staff to access HIV services within workplaces. Most organisations indicated to be flexible for their staff to access HIV services with most staff pointing
out that HIV status is not a barrier to job recruitment or promotion. The mean stigma score amongst staff was relatively low with indication to be more supportive to colleagues who are HIV positive. Nonetheless, the number of staff that have willingly disclosed their HIV status is minimal. This contributed to low involvement of HIV positive in workplace programmes. While majority staff have good knowledge and awareness on HIV, lack of institutional policies on HIV mainstreaming limits their competence to addressing HIV in workplaces. Compared to HIV focused organisations the willingness of staff to talk about HIV in workplaces for non-HIV focused organisations is still
low calling for increased need to support cross learning for purposes of capturing good practices related to HIV internal mainstreaming.