ColaLife moves on the rest of Europe - Part 1

August 31, 2009 by Simon Berry · 1 Comment 

I was interviewed in August for Germany’s on-3 radio over Skype. And here is what was broadcast on 18/8/09 (my bits are in English!):

Filed under: Audio, Coca Cola Campaign, Interview
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?What If!, the innovation company, support ColaLife (again)

August 28, 2009 by Simon Berry · 2 Comments 

Through my day job (Head of Third Sector Team at Defra), I had the good fortune to meet Dave Allan and James Baderman of ?What If!, the innovation company. ?What If! is an international company whose clients include Coca-Cola, Unilever, Cadbury Schweppes and many other big names. On this particular evening ?What If! had been charged with arranging a Ministerial Dinner in Admiralty House to bring social enterprise ambassadors and government officials together. I was there as a government official.

Dave and James were very interested in the possibility of supporting ColaLife through the ?What If! Foundation. I met with James and his colleagues a couple of times but formal support was not possible with an unincorporated body so the potential partnership was put on the back burner.

Fast Forward a few months and we decide we are ready to incorporate ColaLife and need a registered address. I went back to ?What If! to ask if they would provide us with our first ‘legal home’. They said ‘Yes’. So ColaLife’s registered address will shortly be:

The Glassworks,
3-4 Ashland Place,
London, W1U 4AH

Thanks ?What If!. I don’t think ColaLife could have a more appropriate first home.

Filed under: Coca Cola Campaign, Partners
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Progress Report - 26/8/09

August 26, 2009 by Simon Berry · 1 Comment 

MDC Child
Child at Rene MDC, Tanzania, November 2008
Image credit: Simon Berry

May 1988 - May 2008 - the first 7,305 days - no progress!

  • May 1988 Had the idea while working on the British Aid Programme in NE Zambia that Coca-Cola’s distribution muscle could be used to distribute oral rehydration salts in developing countries
  • I tried to promote the idea but made no progress at all!

May 2008 onwards- the last 455 days - real progress!

Next moves

  • ColaLife incorporated as a not-for-profit organisation (Company Limited by Guarantee)
  • Google to announce 100 semi-finalists in their Project 10 to the 100th trawl for the best ideas in the world
  • If ColaLife makes the semi-finalists a voting campaign will start
  • ColaLife will seek a patron
  • Business Plan will be completed
  • Fund raising will begin to raise funds to proptotype and test the aidpod
  • On-going PR campaign to ensure support groups continue to grow

5,500 children die every day in Africa before the age of 5. This initiative could save thousands and thousands of children’s lives through positive engagement between the private and NGO sector.

Filed under: Coca Cola Campaign, Progress Reports
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Hello. My name is Simon and I have diarrhoea

August 22, 2009 by Simon Berry · Leave a Comment 

Does this headline jar a bit? Then read on.

This post is prompted by a TIME Magazine article (Can One Pill Tame the Illness No One Wants to Talk About?) brought to my attention by Magdelena Serpa. As you can see the main theme of the article is the role Zinc can play in treating and even preventing diarrheoa. What it also points out is the discomfort people have about talking about diarrhoea. We all know of the hip (and successful) campaigns supported by rock bands and others against malaria and AIDS but no celebrity has ever got up on the stage for diarrhoea. And yet, in the 21st Century this is STILL the biggest killer of young children in developing countries. Are we letting this scrurge on humanity continue because of some sort of embarrassment?

There are annotated pictures on the TIME Magazine site of how zinc is saving lives in Mali.

[posted from a mobile device]

Filed under: Coca Cola Campaign
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ColaLife, MDCs and Coca-Cola’s Manual Distribution System

August 15, 2009 by Simon Berry · 1 Comment 

ColaLife Wedge in place
This is an assessment of where we have got to in our relationship with Coca-Cola, our understanding of the different mechanisms by which Coca-Cola is distributed in developing countries and the implications for the roll-out of the ColaLife idea. Although the progress we have made is significant, it is evident that we still have a very long way to go.

A summary of progress
When the campaign was re-started on 6 May 2008 with this blog post, our aspiration was simply to get in front of Coca-Cola to talk to them about the ColaLife idea and this is reflected in the name given to the Facebook Group we created at the time to convene people around the idea ‘Let’s talk to Coca Cola about saving the World’s children‘. Remarkably, we achieved this aim within 6 weeks when I was invited by Salvatore Gabola, the then Head of Global Stakeholder Relations, to a meeting in Brussels. Salvatore advised that if the ColaLife idea was going to get any traction within Coca-Cola, we would need to link it to an existing Coca-Cola commitment. That commitment was Coca-Cola’s pledge under the Business Call to Action to expand its Manual Distribution System in a way that maximises its impact of poverty reduction in Africa. This was described by Neville Isdell the then Chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola in this video clip. Note that there is absolutely no mention of social product distribution at this point.

Find more videos like this on Business Fights Poverty

Contrast this with the interview given to the BBC and broadcast on their iPM programme on 25/4/09 - just a year after the campaign started:

Here there is a clear commitment, form Coca-Cola’s Euan Wilmshurst, to look at how Coca-Cola can use their expertise in distribution to get medicines and other ’social products’ to the people who need them.

While all this campaigning has been going on, ColaLife has also been working hard to get Coca-Cola an appropriate global NGO partner to make this happen and get field work underway in Tanzania. The partnership with AED was announced here on 4/8/09.

So far so good. But let’s not get too carried away. There’s a lot of wriggle room in what Coca-Cola have committed to and their Manual Distribution System will not meet all the aspirations of the ColaLife campaign.

Current issues and priorities
The ColaLife idea comes from putting these two facts together:

  1. You can buy Coca-Cola virtually anywhere you go in the world, including the most remote areas of developing countries
  2. In these same areas 1 in 5 children die before their fifth birthday through simple causes like dehydration from diarrhoea due to the lack of simple medicines and other ’social products’

The issue is, that although Coca-Cola’s Manual Distribution System gets Coca-Cola to some of the most densely populated and deprived areas of Africa, it is not the system that gets to the most remote areas. So to fully succeed, ColaLife will have to work beyond Coca-Cola’s, urban, manual distribution system.

Issue 1: We need to understand better how Coca-Cola’s non-manual distribution systems work

Coca-Cola’s Manual Distribution System works through a network of Manual Distribution Centres (MDCs). These MDCs are in densely populated areas and have fairly small territories of a couple a square kilometres. Each MDC receives a full lorry load of Coca-Cola direct from the bottler every week or so. In MDC areas it is envisaged that the ’social products’ would be introduced into the Coca-Cola distribution system at the bottling plant (see: FAQs) in boxes that would be carried in the cab of the lorry and that these would be dropped off, with the crates on Coca-Cola, at the MDC. It would be at the MDC that the ‘aidpods’ would be introduced into the crates. However, if the destination for the Coca-Cola is an MDC in a densely populated area, onward distribution of the ’social products’ may not be necessary given that no-one within the catchment of an MDC is very far away from it. So, in the MDC system, the MDC may be the best ‘offload point’ for the ’social products’ rather than the retail outlets they serve. Members of the public may come to the MDC to access the ’social products’ or the ’social products’ may be collected by a qualified community health worker and dispensed to the local population through a community health programme. In this scenario, ‘aidpods’ would not be a necessary part of the system.

Issue 2: We need to broaden our work with Coca-Cola and their partners to include their non-manual distribution systems

Issue 3: We need to encourage Coca-Cola to broaden their current focus on MDCs and look at how they could use their non-manual distribution networks for good.

Issue 4: We urgently need to prototype aidpod designs to test different materials and processes for introducing them, offloading them and, if necessary, returning them through the non-manual distribution system.

So, we’ve achieved a lot but there is still a lot to do.

Filed under: AidPod, Background Data, Coca Cola Campaign, Videos, colalife 101
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Edging towards incorporation

August 10, 2009 by Simon Berry · Leave a Comment 

Memorandum and Articles of Association - ColalIfe
The ColaLife Campaign has achieved amazing things but the consensus of the Google Group is that it is time to incorporate for several reasons:

  1. To provide supporters, particularly potential funders, a mechanism to engage
  2. To enable ColaLife to inject further pace into the campaign which is totally dependent on Coca-Cola as the moment
  3. To enable ColaLife to engage in design and prototyping of the aidpod concept
  4. To enable ColaLife to bid to implement the ColaLife idea if we make it to the finals of Google’s Project 10 to the 100th

And there are other reasons too which are being incorporated in the Business Plan for ColaLife which has been under development for a couple of months.

We have been very fortunate to have Bates Wells & Braithwaite helping us with the incorporation on a pro bono basis. The Bates Wells & Braithwaite group of solicitors are located opposite St Pauls in London and has a huge reputation in the charity and social enterprise sector in the UK. We are indebted to Uday Thakker of Red Ochre for puting us in contact with Bates Wells & Braithwaite.

We are initially incorporating ColaLife as a (not for profit) Company Limited By Guarantee. This legal structure can have charitable status or CIC (Community Interest Company) status overlaid on it in the future if that is beneficial but such overlays are non-reversible.

I will be meeting with Erica of Bates Wells & Braithwaite tomorrow to sign all the papers for submission to Companies House.

Onwards and upwards.

Filed under: Coca Cola Campaign
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ColaLife featured on the Project 10^100 NOW Blog

August 7, 2009 by Simon Berry · 2 Comments 

Projet 10 100 Now logo
Hats off to Evan Kroske who has started a campaign to get Google to commit to an announcement date for their 10th anniversary competition which has been postponed twice and is currently postponed indefinitely.

It’s true that Google have been somewhat overwhelmed by the number of responses they have received (150,000 in 20+ different languages) but there are many who think they should have ‘open sourced’ the selection process in some way.

Anyway, Evan was generous enough to mention ColaLife as an example of the task Google have taken on - see the blog post and comments here.

He also points to a Digg video interview with Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience at Google, who said that Google will be making some announcements regarding Project 10^100 this fall. In the interview, Mayer said “We’ll be making some announcements coming up this fall to close the process, get the public vote going, and ultimately decide on the winning idea or ideas.” See the full response here. The question starts 7min 20 secs in:

We have made a lot of progress since we submitted our idea to Google way back in October 2008. But we still Google’s help. Here’s why.

And . . . just to finish off . . . let’s remind ourselves what ColaLife is all about:

Filed under: Coca Cola Campaign, Google 10^100, Videos
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ColaLife balloon release

August 5, 2009 by Simon Berry · 3 Comments 

The excitement of yesterday’s announcement was just too much for one ColaLife supporter who decided a balloon release was in order.

The wind direction? Towards Africa! Thanks Emma!

:-)

Filed under: Coca Cola Campaign, Videos
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ColaLife brokers partnership with global NGO for Tanzanian field work

August 4, 2009 by Simon Berry · 13 Comments 

AED Logo
Our first major achievement was to get Coca-Cola’s agreement to look at trialling our ideas on the ground in Africa. Now we can reveal our second major achievement: we have successfully found them the partner they needed. Three weeks ago, on 20th July 2009, after months of partnership development talks, AED (The Academy for Educational Development) started work on the ground in Tanzania with Coca-Cola and local bottler SABCO. Together, they will be looking at the viability of early field trials to develop the work of their MDCs: a ‘learning laboratory’. And we hope that the concepts and ideas Colalife has put forward will form a successful part of those trials.

Over a year ago, in June 2008, when I travelled to Brussels to meet with Salvatore Gabola, Coca-Cola’s Global Head of Stakeholder Relations, he set me a challenge. He liked the idea. He said that the time could be right. BUT:

“Coca-Cola couldn’t do this [colalife] by itself even it wanted to. Distribution of medicines is not our business, not our area of expertise. We would need to partner with an international NGO.”

Not one to turn down a challenge, I started approaching all the big names in the UK. It’s a great idea - surely some big organisation with the expertise we needed would take it forward? What’s to lose? People could only say ‘No’…. Yep, they said No. Six months and a great many polite put-downs later: still no luck. Then I got a message from a member of the Facebook Group, Magdelena Serpa. She works for AED in the States and was really excited by the Colalife idea. She arranged a telephone conference with her colleague, Peter Johnson, a member of AED’s Senior Management Group. We followed this initial call with another involving all the relevant AED experts in Washington and New York and I was able to persuade them that the idea had potential. I undertook to try and set up a telephone conference call with Euan Wilmshurst and Adrian Ristow of Coca-Cola. That was in early December 2008.

The Coca-Cola/AED telephone conference took a while to arrange but finally we all got around the virtual meeting table on 20 January. After a couple more telephone conferences it was clear that this partnership was going to be fruitful. But there was still a lot of work to do to build the relationship; it would not have helped to reveal that negotiations were underway at that time, so I put my blogpost on the back burner and waited.

This week, my contacts at Coca-Cola told me that the work is underway, though any major announcements will have to wait until the findings start to emerge. This exploratory phase will assess the viability of social product distribution and social messaging, for trials in the last quarter of this year.

This is a big day for ColaLife: a truly significant milestone for the ColaLife campaign and the culmination of months of work behind the scenes. Thank goodness I don’t have to keep this to myself any longer!

Onwards and upwards.

Filed under: AED, Coca Cola Campaign, NGOs, Partners, Tanzania
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