CAIRO, EGYPT - Under fire from activists, the Coca-Cola Company announced Thursday it was joining with its bottlers in Africa to extend AIDS health care coverage, including access to expensive drugs, to tens of thousands of workers. <br>
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The U.S. soft-drink giant started providing coverage to its own 1,200 employees in hard-hit Africa in June 2001, but the program did not cover the roughly 600,000 people working for independent Coke bottlers. <br>
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A spokesman for Coca-Cola Africa, Robert Ahomka Lindsay, said ``What we are trying to do here is engage and offer a program for the others. It's a natural extension of what we've been doing the past two years as a company.'' <br>
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DaimlerChrysler and other multinationals operate similar programs for their employees in Africa, which is home to two-thirds of the estimated 40 million people worldwide now infected with HIV, which causes AIDS. <br>
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AIDS activists argued that Atlanta-based Coca-Cola -- the largest private employer in Africa when its network of bottlers is included -- had the capacity to reach many more people. <br>
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Coke officials had maintained that the bottlers were independent companies and as such responsible for their own workers. <br>
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Under the new initiative, the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation, based in Swaziland in southern Africa, will split 50-50 with local bottlers the cost of extending health care benefits, including expensive anti-retroviral drugs, to their employees and their spouses. <br>
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Lindsay estimated the cost to the foundation at four million dollars to five million dollars a year.
