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Accountable body confirmed and other exciting things

17 December 2011 By Leave a Comment

Because ColaLife is new and has no ‘track record’ as an international NGO, DfID Zambia is unable to give their funding directly to us to run the Zambia trial. Instead it will be given to an ‘accountable body’, whose job it is to ensure the money is spent correctly and provide the financial reports required by DfID. The need for an accountable body was anticipated in our planning but we had not identified one at the time the DfID support was agreed.

Generally speaking accountable bodies don’t come cheap. Some will charge up to 17% of the project’s budget to act as an accountable body and, in addition, they may add another layer of treacle-like bureaucracy to a project.

Ideally we’d want an accountable body which is really enthusiastic about what we are doing, wouldn’t charge too much and which adds value to the project in some way.

I’m pleased to say we have found an accountable body that does all of this and a lot more.

COMESA LogoThe accountable body for the ColaLife Operational Trial Zambia (COTZ), to give it its full title, will be COMESA – The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa. COMESA already has accountable body status with DfID and through COMESA, DfID already funds the Trademark Southern Africa (TMSA) Programme.

COTZ will be managed as a project of TMSA who will provide the accountancy services at no cost to COTZ. In addition, TMSA will provide COTZ with office space and office support services free of charge.

 

Finally, TMSA will be contributing an additional £101,000 over the next two years to cover the costs of following up the interest in ColaLife in other African countries. This work will run in parallel with the trial once the trial set-up phase is complete. TMSA are doing this because they are interested in the ColaLife concept, particularly in the supply chain and public-private partnership aspects of the project.

And as if that isn’t enough, COMESA will be giving Jane and I contracts to run COTZ under the umbrella of TMSA. This provides us with appropriate legal status and means that we do not have to set up ColaLife in Zambia – this is totally consistent with our desire to keep our institutional footprint as small as possible and work though local organisations.

So, our period as full-time volunteers is over for the time being. It lasted 18 months and was probably the most rewarding 18 months of my life (so far) although our bank manager would have a different view.

We are very grateful to TMSA, COMESA and DfID for proposing these arrangements and working so hard to get them in place especially given that the whole administration section of COMESA HQ was lost in a fire last weekend.

 

 

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

So what happened at the Honda hack days back in November?

14 December 2011 By Leave a Comment

A good question, that isn’t easy to answer as there was so much going on. Basically, most of Honda’s Cultural Engineers (I am one) gathered for the first time face-to-face, together with a bunch of application developers to see what would happen. Three videos have just been released on The Guardian website which capture the weekend quite well. The first of these is embedded below (for those reading this on the blog). The whole set can be viewed on The Guardian website here.

As you will see a lot of the stuff that was worked on was pretty experimental. I went along with an almost embarrassingly practical suggestion for an iPhone application I really need. Unfortunately this was not taken up by any of the developers during the weekend but I believe one of them has picked it up subsequently. Hopefully something will emerge from this.

As a note to myself I thought I’d describe the app I need right here.

The problem

I do a lot of presentations in an effort to spread the ColaLife idea and the thinking behind it in order to get reactions (from which we learn) and support which helps us move the idea forward. The trouble is that there are only a finite number of people present at these events and when the presentation is done, it’s done.

I’d like an application that would record what I say at these presentations so that I could then overlay the audio on to the presentation slides and put them online. I have overlaid audio onto slideshows before using Slideshare but recording an audio track retrospectively takes a lot of time and I can never capture the atmosphere and energy of a presentation when it was first delivered in public.

Once online with an audio track the presentation could be viewed by many other people. 450 people listened to my TEDxBerlin presentation on the day I gave it. Nearly 3,600 have subsequently watched the presentation online.

The solution (function list)

This is what I’d like the application to do.

  1. The key functionality is to be able to record the speaker as they give their presentation so that the audio that is captured can be overlaid on the presentation (using SlideShare or SlideRocket) to create a ‘SlideCast’.
  2. To do the above you need some sort mechanism for getting the recording off the iPhone as an MP3. One way of doing this might be to send it to AudioBoo. Once on AudioBoo you can download the MP3 from there. This isn’t ideal but would do for a first version!
  3. The user should be able to pause and resume the recording during the presentation
  4. The application should also control the presentation with forward and back buttons which would send a ‘mouse-click’ and a ‘back arrow’ signal to the PC or Mac hosting the presentation. This would mean that the application could be used to control presentations in PowerPoint and SlideRocket.
  5. The matching of the audio with the slideshow would be done by hand.
  6. The applications should display the time elapsed and keyword-type prompts for the current slide. These would be entered by hand before the presentation delivery

The user interface

The user interface could look something like this. Note that the iPhone would be held upside down – so the display needs to upside down too – so that the Mic is nearer the speaker’s mouth. The iPhone would be held like a Mic and I would use a foam Mic cover on the iPhone like I do for my podcasts:

User Interface for iPhone App

Nice additional touches

  1. In the setting file for the application there would be an option to configure for right or left handed users (this would swap the buttons around ie the forward/backward button and the pause/resume record button)
  2. The timer could be set to count up or count down

 

Filed Under: ColaLife Pre-Trial, Events Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Funding Network pledges £10,000 to ColaLife

12 December 2011 By Leave a Comment

The Funding Network LogoWe were honoured to be nominated by a member of The Funding Network and then very pleased to be selected as one of five social causes to face the ‘friendly dragons den’ that is The Funding Network. This all happened last Thursday evening. Our Chairman, Andy Chapman, made the pitch and he was supported by ColaLife supporter, Damian Radcliffe, who helped work the crowd!

On Friday we heard that Funding Network members had pledged a massive £10,260 to our core costs. No one likes funding core costs, everyone wants ‘projects’, so this funding is particularly welcome. So far, we have provided extremely high returns for those people who have given us unrestricted funding. The first significant blocks of funding we received: £6,000 from the Boulogne to Biarritz bike ride and the money raised through the Buzzbnk (£3,000), paid for the trip to Zambia to work with local organisations to co-design and develop the plan for the trial. With this plan we have raised £840,000 for the ColaLife Trial which starts for real in January, and £101,500 for development work in other African countries which will start in September next year. That’s a return of 10,400%.

As is usual, ColaLife got an overwhelmingly positive ‘why didn’t anyone else think of that’ response, with a sprinkling of one or two people suspicious of Coke’s involvement and others wondering why Coca-Cola wasn’t funding the trial themselves.

On the first point, despite the word ‘cola’ in our name, ColaLife is completely independent of The Coca-Cola Company. There are more than 200 ‘Colas’ in the world and Coca-Cola only owns one of them. And ‘Cola’ or ‘Kola’ is also a nut with big cultural (and relevant) significance in many African countries.

On the funding front, our strategy has been that we should not approach Coca-Cola for funding, at least in the early years. Instead, we wanted to develop our relationship with Coca-Cola as a ‘trusted third party’. We wanted to be seen as an organisation that could bring unlikely alliances together to do extraordinary things. In addition, we needed a relationship with the business side of the The Coca-Cola Company not the philanthropic side. And finally, we wanted to maintain our independence – always important for a non-affiliated charity organisation, but especially so when you need to show objectively whether an idea works or not. We are very vulnerable to being overwhelmed by organisations such as Coca-Cola and that would not be good, in our judgement, if the ColaLife concept is to flourish.

All of this doesn’t preclude Coca-Cola funding in the future but let that be a business decision they make based on the outputs of the trial.

So once again, many thanks to The Funding Network - your support is very valuable to us.

Filed Under: Funding Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

I went on a bike ride

11 December 2011 By Leave a Comment

IMG_3450

Expatriate life here can have very little exercise in it unless you work at it. If you’re not careful you move from office chair to car seat to another chair. So I’ve decided to get a bicycle. It’s not really practical to use it for work. Respect levels would fall through the floor if you turned up for meetings on a bike dripping with sweat in cycle attire. So I’ve got a mountain bike for leisure cycling and I’ve been practising.

Bicycles all over the world get you off the beaten track and allow you to see the environment differently and Zambia is no exception. Yesterday as I cycled through a part of Lusaka called Kalikiliki and came across these guys. They were pushing along their handmade lorries, trucks and trains with green sticks. The vision is that in a few years time ADK Packaging will be a component of these toys. If this happens we will have succeeded.

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign Tagged With: , ,

ColaLife wins global health innovation award

7 December 2011 By 1 Comment

MMHEALTH Winners' BadgeColaLife is one of three winners of the Boehringer Ingelheim/Ashoka Changemakers ‘Making More Health’ award announced today, 8am EST. 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.

After the announcement of the finalists, the public were asked to vote. It was a great achievement to reach the final and given the thousands of committed supporters ColaLife has online I thought we were in a good position to win. I want to thank everyone who voted and campaigned on our behalf and apologies to those of you I pestered just a bit too much!

The award comes with a prize of $10,000 (US). This represents unrestricted funding for us which means we can spend it how we like. Although we have just been successful raising £840,000 for the trial in Zambia, this can only be spent on the trial. It cost time and money to put the plan together and this is what we need unrestricted funding for to enable us to keep the momentum going and raise the necessary ‘project’ funding to generate activity on the ground. This prize money will help build a firmer foundation for future ColaLife developments.

Of course the other thing that comes with an award like this is credibility. In the award process ColaLife has been scrutinised by a small army of experts and then voted for by the general public. What better endorsement can there be for what we are doing than that?

Finally, we get to network with other contestants and winners doing inspiring things. This networking started last night when the team at Ashoka brought the award winners together using the video ‘Hang-out’ feature within Google+. I didn’t think this was going to work for us at all as we’ve had real internet problems in Zambia over the past 3 days. However, we did get on and the connection lasted long enough for us to introduce ColaLife and hear the introductions of the other two winners. I even managed to get some screen shots! See below:

Jennifer Staple–Clark | Unite For Sight Jennifer Staple-Clark
Unite for Sight
Unite For Sight has provided eye care to more than 1.3 million people worldwide, including more than 49,000 sight-restoring surgeries for patients living in poverty. Unite For Sight believes in the social entrepreneurial vision and commitment of local medical professionals, and we develop a powerful synergy by harnessing the entrepreneurial talent of local healthcare leaders with support in the form of human and financial resources. Unite For Sight partners with local eye clinics to eliminate patient barriers to care and to provide consistent, quality, and sustainable eye care to patients in rural villages, slums, and refugee camps.
Vera Cordeiro | Saúde Criança Vera Cordeiro
Saúde Criança
Childhood illnesses among the poor occur within a larger socioeconomic context in which the conditions of poverty serve to instigate and perpetuate the symptoms of disease. Saúde Criança aims to break this persistent cycle of poverty and suffering by providing holistic support to families to address their total well-being, not merely their disease. This is achieved through a multidimensional action plan that addresses all the components necessary to achieve sustainable good health for the entire family, including support in health, housing, income generation, education, and citizenship. By lifting families out of poverty, Saúde Criança’s method represents true recovery for those who suffer.

This is Jane and I looking very surprised (and delighted) to be online at all! Note the participants in the strip of images across the bottom of the screen.

Simon and Jane Berry | ColaLife
Google+ Hangout bringing together the MMHEALTH winners with the Ashoka team, 9am EST, 6 December 2011. Vera was changing seats with her colleague at the moment this screenshot was taken!

 

Filed Under: Awards Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

The biggest day so far for ColaLife

6 December 2011 By 1 Comment

Yesterday (5/12/11) was the biggest day so far in ColaLife’s development. It started with a presentation to the Johnson & Johnson Africa Contribution Committee (ACC). It seems that this committee reviews all of Johnson & Johnson’s social investments in Africa and holds its meetings in different African countries on a peripatetic basis. Both of our key contacts were present at the meeting and it was great to be updating them of the progress we were making on our new home territory.

There is huge interest and willingness to support ColaLife and a realistic understanding that we will have successes and set-backs over the next two years and that we need to learn from both. The relationship with Johnson & Johnson feels right. There is a feeling that we are in this together. There is a real sense of partnership.

Despite the flakiness of our internet connection at times, I have taken to using the online SlideRocket system for presentations. The presentation that I gave to the Johnson & Johnson committee is embedded below. I recorded an audio track on my phone using AudioBoo but have been unable to upload it due to a poor internet connection over the last few days. I will add the audio when I can. You will need to be online to view this (go online now).

After the presentation we went over to the DfID section of the British High Commission to set-up for the kick-off meeting with implementation partners which ran from 3-5:30pm and could have gone on for a lot longer. We worked most of the weekend preparing for this and it went really well. Jane did most of the brain work and I made the props!

Workshop tools and materials | 5/12/11
Workshop tools and materials. Clockwise from bottom left: Mock information inserts; soap; PedZinc blister packs; model cardboard carton (the real one will probably measure 40 x 40 x 40cm); model ADKs; sachets of ORS; vouchers laid out on a copy of the Gantt chart

We used a technique described to us by our friends at Boxwood to surface issues arising from the supply chain aspects of the projects. The technique works like this: you use a model, or the actual item to be distributed and you give it to a person from the first organisation in the supply chain. They describe their role to everyone else and hand the item to a person from the second organisation in the supply chain. They describe their role and pass to a person from the third organisation and so on until the item reaches the customer. Of course it doesn’t go as smoothly as I have just described as the whole process generates discussion and questions and deepens the understanding of the process for all those involved and those observing.

In the ColaLife Trial we will be distributing two things: the vouchers and the anti-diarrhoea kits (ADKs). In the case of the vouchers there is also a redemption process to consider and in the case of the ADKs there is the process of procurement of the packaging and the components and the assembly of the ADKs that all needs to be taken into account.

Both of these exercises took a lot longer than we anticipated but worked brilliantly at surfacing the issues and deepening collective understanding.

We had intended to follow these exercises with group work to look at the other dependencies in the project but we ran out of time so partners took away copies of the Gantt chart to study by themselves and get back with any issues they may have.

We then moved on and joined others at a Reception for ColaLife at the High Commissioner’s residence hosted by the High Commissioner himself Tom Carter. To this we’d invited all the people who had helped us to get this far. Stakeholders attended who had contributed to the trial design but were not now directly involved in the delivery. We hope that many of them will join the trial steering committee to advise but also learn as the trial progresses. Zambia’s Vice President, Guy Scott, attended which was a great honour and it was really good that our contacts from Johnson & Johnson were there too.

So we now have everyone re-engaged and thinking more clearly about their role pending the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Ministry of Health which is ‘in the system’ and we hope will emerge soon. Once the MoU is signed we will be able undertake an official launch and we will be on our way.

 

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Dreams can come true

30 November 2011 By 5 Comments

British High Commission invitation

Today, as we were packing to catch tonight’s flight back to Lusaka, the above invitation arrived by email. The British High Commissioner, Mr Tom Carter, is hosting a reception to mark the launch of the funding agreement for the ColaLife trial in Zambia on Monday (5/12/11). So, the secret is out: we can now confirm that our final funder – and majority funder – for the ColaLife Operational Trial Zambia is: DfID Zambia.

In summary, the funding package looks like this:

  1. DfID Zambia
  2. Johnson & Johnson Corporate Citizenship Trust
  3. SABMiller Zambia (Zambian Breweries)
  4. Honda

We are grateful to them all. All but Honda are able to be represented. We are still in negotiations with a fifth funder who will support work to follow-up interest in ColaLife from other countries. This work will be additional and very complementary  to the trial. More on this later.

The launch reception is an opportunity for us to say thank you and re-engage with all the people in Zambia who have contributed to the trial design or helped us in other ways. We hope that some of these will be willing to serve on the trial steering committee.

Before the reception, all the implementation partners will come together for a final pre-trial workshop, to focus in particular on the detail of the Gantt Chart and the dependencies. This will allow us to get off to a flying start and launch the trial in January.

If someone had said to me, 3 years ago when I set up the ColaLife Facebook Group, that next week we’d be at the High Commissioner’s Residence in Lusaka celebrating the launch of the funding agreement for ColaLife Trial, I wouldn’t have believed them. Dreams can come true!

Filed Under: ColaLife Pre-Trial Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

ColaLife Poster

25 November 2011 By Leave a Comment

ColaLife Poster for WHCC Events
View and download the full-size poster here. The full-size poster will print 4′ x 6′.

I am totally delighted with this poster. It was produced by Kieran Harrod of Derby Graphic Design following our call on the ColaLife Facebook Page for graphic designers to produce a poster for the World Congress conferences. The poster will be used in the World Health Care Congress (WHCC) series of events starting with Abu Dhabi on 11-13 December. We have been in conversation with the WHCC team for a while now as they have a particular interest in health innovation. ColaLife featured on the WHCC Innovations blog last September.

Everyone is free to download and display this poster. If you do, we’d be interested in any feedback.

 

 

 

Filed Under: ColaLife Pre-Trial Tagged With: , ,

A day at the Westminster Hub – video ColaLife update

23 November 2011 By Leave a Comment

Yesterday I spent a great day at the new Westminster Hub. I’m grateful to have honorary membership in exchange for helping out with the launch of the hub from Zambia. Jane and I wrote a ‘manifesto for unlikely alliances’ based our our experience so far putting the ColaLife project together. Click on the image to view it enlarged on Flickr.

Westiminster Hub Manifesto Unlikely Alliances

This is on display along with others at the hub.

My day started with a meeting with Algy Williams, CEO of the start-up Every1Mobile kindly arranged by Mark Stevenson following a conversation we had at this weekend’s Honda Hack at The Guardian.

This was a bit of a meeting of minds. We had a great conversation about ‘results-based development’ and the role of enterprise in development. I am sure that this was the first of many conversations. Watch this space.

After this meeting I settled down to do some work until my next meeting at 4pm.  Then I got a tap on my shoulder and there was Andy Chapman – the ColaLife Chairman. Andy works for Sandbox who will be setting up their amazing collaboration system at The Hub and running their innovation workshops there.

Other people floating around included Paul Miller who I know from his ground-breaking School of Everything. There were other familiar faces that I couldn’t put names to – it’s my age!

At 4pm I’d arranged to meet up with David Wilcox (socialreporter.com and socialreporters.net) and William Hoyle for a catch-up and coffee. Both are great friends and ColaLife supporters. David has always been a bit of a mentor to me on all the social media/open innovation stuff and ColaLife still benefits from the free software and systems (eg Huddle and SlideRocket) available through CTXchange which William set up while CEO at Charity Technology Trust. Interestingly, our paths’ have both led to Africa in the last year or so. William now runs techfortrade which is working to improve livelihoods through the use of mobile technology. Jane and I last met William the week before last in Lusaka where techfortrade is working on a project to improve cross-border trade between Zambia and Angola.

David never misses a chance to catch up on the ColaLife story and capture these catch-ups on video and yesterday was no exception. Below is a short video summarising the ColaLife journey over the last 18 months. It ends with a request to vote for us in the Making More Health competition. Your vote could win us $10,000.

Filed Under: ColaLife Pre-Trial Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Can I have just a minute of your time?

14 November 2011 By Leave a Comment

Click here to vote for ColaLife Click here to vote for ColaLife

Back in August ColaLife was encouraged by supporters to enter the Making More Health competition so we did, along with more than 470 others from 82 countries. On 9 November 2011 the 13 finalists were announced and ColaLife was amongst them. The public is now invited to vote to determine the competition’s three winners, who will each receive a $10,000 (US) cash prize to help further their idea. So now it’s over to you!

This is a plea to ask you to vote for ColaLife. Voting takes less than a minute (honestly). Click here, click the green VOTE button, enter your email address and town and that’s it. Thank you! Voting closes on 30 November.

Once you’ve voted you can help us further by telling your friends and work colleagues and encouraging them to vote for us too. The short url for the voting page is: http://colalife.org/vote. Just pass this on.

According to the organisers - Ashoka Changemakers and Boehringer Ingelheim - the finalists 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.

The full list of finalists are listed here.

Filed Under: Awards Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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