The Program Director of the GBCA, attended a landmark conference of the PABC at which the first Board of Directors was elected to replace the interim Board.  The meeting took place in October 2008 at the VIP Hotel, Maputo.  The eleven member Board was elected from 27 member business coalitions with representation from East Central, West and South Africa.

The PABC took advantage of this meeting to provide some training for the particpants at the meeting.  This meeting was sponsored by Stanbic Bank and GTZ.

15 companies participated in a 3 day training workshop on Monitoring and Evaluation of HIV & AIDS Workplace Programs (M&E of WPP). The training is based on ACCA Toolbox (developed by GTZ and Swiss Tropical Institute, Global Business Coalition), an interactive computer model which allows to design, monitor and evaluate own M&E systems by the implementing companies. It is as well intended that the indicators used by the companies will be harmonized with the national indicators, so that the contribution of the private sector and businesses implementing workplace programs could be better summarized and integrated in the national response to HIV & AIDS

The first in this series was a two day workshop that took place in Accra in June. Six companies participated. The representives were trained to help the HIV committees ikn their workplaces to design a draft of their workplace HIV policy which can be adopted after further consultations with the workforce and management.

The four day training took place from the 23rd of May 2008. The excel-based 'HIV/AIDS Cost-Benefit-Analysis' was developed by GTZ with support of the Swiss Tropical Institute. The tool is a valuable monitoring instrument for HR departments interested in following up on what HIV/AIDS really means to the company in economic terms. It helps to monitor absenteeism, increased training and medical costs, etc. as well as the costs that the company is willing to spend on prevention, care and mitigation activities. By processing all company data, the tool allows to establish a cost-benefit ratio of an HIV/AIDS workplace programme with the help of an epidemiological model of HIV/AIDS.