ColaLife has caught people’s imagination and has been recognised in several awards. These are listed below in reverse chronological order.
Overall winner, 25th DuPont Packaging Innovation Awards 2013 – 16 May 2013
ColaLife’s Kit Yamoyo anti-diarrhoea kit took the Diamond Award at the 25th DuPont Awards for Packaging Innovation. It also won the ‘Food Security’ award.
Key to this success are our packaging partner, PI Global, and some of the poorest people in Zambia who worked with us to come up with a product that worked for them.
On this win, Senator Coons, Chair of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs, said:
“It’s not just small packages that good things come in – it’s clever ones, too. The AidPod is proof that the combination of ingenuity, innovation and inspiration is powerful enough to overcome the world’s greatest humanitarian challenges. ColaLife and pi 3′s pairing of smart packaging with an effective distribution platform has enormous potential to make a real difference in sub-Saharan Africa.”
2013 Observer Ethical Awards – 16 May 2013
ColaLife’s Kit Yamoyo anti-diarrhoea kit has been shortlisted in the ‘Products and Services’ section of the 2013 Observer Ethical Awards. In the announcement the newspaper said:
Today [16/5/13] we announce the people, places and businesses that have won over a stellar list of judges to become finalists in the eighth Observer Ethical Awards, in association with Ecover. The final winners, drawn from every corner of the UK from the familiar to the entirely unsung, will be announced on 13 June in central London at the annual event dubbed ‘The Green Oscars.’
Product Design of the Year 2013 – 10 April 2013
ColaLife’s Kit Yamoyo anti-diarrhoea kit won Product Design of the Year 2013. These awards are billed as the ‘Oscars of the Design World’ and showcase the most innovative and imaginative designs from around the world, over the past year. The categories are: Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Furniture, Graphics, Transport and Product.
MOO Award – 28 November 2012
ColaLife won the inaugural MOO Award 2012. We have used MOO Cards even before ColaLife had a website. People enthuse about them when you hand them over and usually want more than one!
We use them to carry pictures of our work and key Powerpoint slides from the presentations we give that make key points . . . like why innovation is needed to save children’s lives and why we think involving local people in the solution is so important. And, of course, if people actively want your business card they are going to remember you and keep it. Here I relate an experience handing over a MOO Card in Tanzania in the early days of ColaLife. When it came to the ID Cards for our promoters and retailers for the trial here in Zambia, we used MOO Cards for that too!
Part of the awards was £1,000 of MOOlah (MOO currency) and so I’m going to enjoy experimenting with the all the other products MOO produce like stickers, labels and postcards.
So thank you MOO! I’ll leave you with what one of the judges said and a link to the full awards story:
MOO Award judge Fraser Doherty enthused, “Having recently stayed with a family in a mud house in Uganda, where access to medicine and other vital supplies was sadly extremely limited but Coke was everywhere, the idea for ColaLife makes perfect sense and is one that I would absolutely love to see become a huge success.”
Grand Challenges Canada – 22 November 2012
Grand Challenges Canada supports bold ideas with the potential for big impact in global health. They are funded by the Government of Canada and fund innovators in low and middle-income countries as well as in Canada. The bold ideas they support integrate science/technology, social and business innovation – something they call Integrated Innovation™, and something that we believe is exemplified by ColaLife.
UK Packaging Awards – 14 November 2012
ColaLife was a finalist in three categories of the UK packaging Awards:
- New concept of the year
- Innovation of the year
- Best CSR initiative of the year
We were highly commended in the innovation and CSR categories. More on the ColaLife packaging (the AidPod).
Making More Health Award – Boehringer Ingelheim/Ashoka Changemakers – 7 December 2011
When announcing this award, Jean Scheftsik de Szolnok, Vice-President Southern Europe for Boehringer Ingelheim said:
“The Making More Health competition reflects Boehringer Ingelheim’s commitment to supporting leadership and innovation in healthcare and to improving health for individuals, families, and communities”
The 13 finalists announced on 9 November 2011, were selected from more than 470 entries received from 82 countries are were said to represent the most innovative and promising solutions from around the globe that are transforming the field of health. Finalists were selected by the competition’s panel of expert judges, which included Aman Bhandari of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Carol A. Dahl, executive director of The Lemelson Foundation, and Andreas Barner, Chairman of the Board of Managing Directors for Boehringer Ingelheim.
Buckminster Fuller Challenge – 2010
In 2010, ColaLife made it into the semi-finals of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge. The judges said:
We admire your commitment and truly believe that the solutions to our intractable problems lies in the hearts, minds and synergies between those of you on the front lines of what Fuller called comprehensive, anticipatory design. This design approach crosses disciplines, transcends conventional process and gives us the tools, perspectives and strategies to take on and solve once and for all the global problems before us. Bucky called himself a comprehensive anticipatory design scientist – we think this pretty much sums you up too.
UnLtd Award – June 2010
This is the award that enabled ColaLife to move from a cool campaign into a focussed activity with the aim of getting a trial underway somewhere in Africa. The award was worth £15,000 and was awarded to Jane and Simon Berry personally. This enabled them to give up their employment a spend 18 months short-listing possible countries and then visiting Zambia to work with local organisations to design the COTZ Trial and raise the funding to implement it.
