ColaLife FAQs Live!
June 30, 2010 by Simon Berry · 3 Comments
Back in February 2010, ColaLife supporter, Lisa ter Haar of onlyconnectcommunication contacted me. She’d mentioned ColaLife in a lecture to her students at the Hult International Business School and they’d had lots and lots of questions. So Lisa invited me in for a question and answer session the following week (1/3/10). When I got the invitation I was delighted and started to think how we might make the session more interesting and capture the content so that others could benefit.
I immediately called my friend, David Wilcox (socialreporter.com) to ask if he would help film the occasion. But we went further than that and gave Flip video cameras to the students too. This produced hours of footage from four cameras and it was at this point that Alex Brenig-Jones of studiomagicsolutions.com stepped in and offered to edit the footage free of charge. So this is a truly collaborative effort and thanks go to all those involved (especially Alex - the editing was a significant amount of work!).
Above is a video playlist of all the questions and below is a grid to allow direct access to each one. As you will be able to see, this was a totally unrehearsed session and I had no previous knowledge of the questions.
Key to all of the questions:
| FAQ1: How will the ColaLife AidPods get into the Coca-Cola distribution system? | FAQ2: How did ColaLife get Coca-Cola’s attention? | FAQ3: Will the AidPods be disposable? |
| FAQ4: Who needs to be involved locally? | FAQ5: Where do Coca-Cola’s responsibilities begin and end? | FAQ6: Which other organisations are a part of ColaLife? |
| FAQ7: What is ColaLife’s role in training and capacity building of public health workers? | FAQ8: How will ColaLife be funded? | FAQ9: How will ColaLife work with others? |
I will be using this material to liven up the ColaLife FAQ page.
ColaLife principle: be the glue
June 29, 2010 by Simon Berry · Leave a Comment
etc etc etc
We believe that there are already enough organisations, both locally and internationally to implement a trial of the Colalife concept. We also believe that if a trial were successful that their are enough organisations to implement ColaLife on an on-going, sustainable basis. ColaLife has no aspiration to become another player in the frontline of the delivery of public health services. We just want to be the glue that brings unlikely alliances together to trial something quite extraordinary.
Introducing the Mark IV AidPod
June 28, 2010 by Simon Berry · 4 Comments
A comparison of the cross-section of the Mark III (right) and Mark IV (left) AidPods. Hand-written numbers are volume calculations.
I was ruthless in the way I took advantage of a visit from my daughter over the weekend. Sorry (and thanks) Emma! You see, she can use Adobe Illustrator and I can’t (note to self: must make time to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator). Anyway, with me on scissors, glue, pencil, profile gauge and ruler and Emma on the computer we have come up with Mark IV of the AidPod.
Over the last few weeks as video and pictures have come back to me of the Mark III AidPod in crates in Africa, it had become apparent that some modification of the cross-section were required for it to fit properly between the necks of the bottles in crates. Thanks to Wes Browning of SemaFilms for the video clips and to all the people who have sent me photos and commentaries.
I only have one African Coca-Cola bottle and it is incredibly difficult to get an accurate cross-section of it but I think we have managed. Here are the Adobe Illustrator files Emma created in .AI and .PDF formats for those who are interested:
The image with this post compares the cross-section of the Mark III with that of the new Mark IV. The key problem with the Mark III was that it was too deep and hit the crate divider before it was fully inserted. I have compensated for having to shorten the AidPod and the thin end by making it slightly taller (and the fat end). There is a reduction in volume but the Mark IV still has a capacity of just over half a litre. Looking at these cross-sections again as I type this, I realise that the top section of the new Mark IV could probably be a bit wider - we’ll see.
ColaLife principle: openness
February 10, 2010 by Simon Berry · Leave a Comment
I first had the ColaLife idea in 1988 when I was working for the British Aid programme in NE Zambia. However, I was unable to share it other than by word of mouth and I got nowhere.
In May 2008 I shared the idea on Facebook and look what’s happened. Thousands of people have convened around the idea and discussed it and challenged it and the idea has got better and better. We have gone from this:
 |
 |
Removing one bottle from every 10 crates and replacing it with a cylinder full of Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS) to this:
 |
 |
A wedge-shaped container that uses the un-used space in a crate and carries whatever ’social products’ are needed in a local area, as determined by the local public health experts.
So openness has convened thousands of people around the idea. This has improved the idea, given us more and more confidence in the idea and got Coca-Cola’s attention. We just need some action now!
ColaLife principle: promoting micro-enterprise
February 3, 2010 by Simon Berry · 1 Comment
Image credit: Tielman Nieuwoudt
A key reason why Coca-Cola’s distribution network is so good in Africa is that there is money to be made by everyone involved in it. And those that make money from taking the bottles that ‘last mile’ are some of the poorest people on the continent. So giving a financial reward for the successful delivery of an AidPod will:
- Put money in the pockets of some of the poorest people in Africa;
- Help ensure that the ColaLife system is sustainable;
- Help deter corruption and mis-use of the distribution mechanism.
For these reasons we will develop systems to give a financial reward to those who deliver AidPods and those who act as receiving agents. We think that mobile phone based systems will provide the mechanism to support the confirmation of delivery and the payments this would trigger.
ColaLife principle: local determination
January 31, 2010 by Simon Berry · 1 Comment
A key principle of ColaLife is local determination of how the ColaLife opportunity is used in each location. I believe that this will be key to the sustainability of ColaLife. ColaLife must strengthen the existing public health infrastructure, not undermine it. This is a slide I use to explain this during the presentations I am giving at the moment.
The ColaLife model can be split into three elements. At the core we have a distribution mechanism - AidPods in Coca-Cola crates - which would be replicable across the whole of Africa. 80% of all the Coca-Cola produced in Africa is sold from bottles and crates of this size. In July 2008 The Economist reported that Africans buy 36 billion bottles of Coke a year. That’s an average of more than 30 bottles per person! So this is a formidable distribution channel and an incredible offer if Coca-Cola were to support it.
The plan is that this distribution mechanism would be offered across the whole of Africa to those with the long term responsibility, in each locality, for public health. This would normally be a range of partnerships between NGOs and the Government of the country. It would be up the Goverment/NGOs in each locality to decide whether they want to make use of this opportunity and if so, how to use it. Coca-Cola would be likely to put certain conditions on the use of this channel eg maximum weight per AidPod; maximum number of AidPods per crate; and content would be restricted to ’social products’.
On the input side, the local public health infrastructure (Goverment/NGOs) would decide what should go into the AidPods. This will vary from place to place and from season to season. Crucially, it is not up to Coca-Cola or ColaLife to say what goes in the AidPods. This needs to be determined by those with the long term responsibility for public health in a particular area.
It would also be the local public health infrastructure (Goverment/NGOs) who decide what happens to the AidPods when they reach their destination. The contents might be put on the shelves of the Coca-Cola retailer and sold. This would obviously depend on the nature of the social products involved. They may be collected by a community health worker and used to support a community health programme. The AidPods might contain diarrhoea treatment kits for new mothers and be collected by traditional village midwives or the local clinic. I am sure that there are many other options but the local health experts will be the best people to decide.
So, the roll-out of ColaLife, following successful trials, will empower the public health infrastructure in any particular locality. Not undermine it. And in remote areas it will provide a distribution mechanism that would be uneconomic to provide in any other way.
Fortunately, this principle is compatible with the position Coca-Cola would want to take. They would not want to put themselves in a position where they could be accused of meddling in areas beyond their areas of expertise or of undermining local, often fragile, public health infrastructure.
CALL TO ACTION: Please email WHO and/or UNICEF
October 14, 2009 by Simon Berry · 2 Comments
The World Health Organisation (WHO) published this report today and it provides us with a unique opportunity to get the ColaLife concept on their agenda. It is an excellent fit with what they propose.
Please take a moment to email any (or all) of these three people to ask them to look at what we are doing here - suggested text is given below:
In New York
Brian Hansford
UNICEF
Telephone: +1 212 326 7269
E-mail: bhansford@unicef.orgIn New York
Kate Donovan
Media, UNICEF
Telephone: +1 212 326 7452
E-mail: kdonovan@unicef.orgIn Geneva
Olivia Lawe-Davies
Communications Officer, WHO
Telephone: +41 22 791 1209
Mobile: +41 794 755 545
Email: lawedavieso@who.int
Suggested text (but make your own up if you like!):
Dear <you choose>
I’d like to welcome the publication of your report: ’Diarrhoea: Why children are still dying and what can be done’. This issue is of great concern to thousands of us, members of the ColaLife campaign - http://colalife.org. I was particularly struck by this statement as this is precisely the solution the ColaLife campaign is trying to deliver:
“UNICEF and WHO recommend that all children with diarrhoea have access to this new ORS formula; making it widely available to children in need will require innovative delivery strategies.”
The key partnerships are now in place for trials to move forward and anything you can do to raise the profile of the Colalife idea to make it a reality would be gratefully appreciated.
Yours sincerely
etc
Thanks.
ColaLife, MDCs and Coca-Cola’s Manual Distribution System
August 15, 2009 by Simon Berry · 1 Comment
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:
- You can buy Coca-Cola virtually anywhere you go in the world, including the most remote areas of developing countries
- 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.
ColaLife Pods - what the frontline thinks
November 27, 2008 by Simon Berry · 17 Comments
I have written so much about what has happened over the last two days but I have not quite finished or publshed anything yet (it will come). But the video below sums it all up. The context is as follows. Today I went out with Benito Xaverly, one of the Area Sales Manager for Dar Es Salaam. He’s a Business Administration graduate and until recently he worked for Pepsi. He had not heard of ColaLife before we got in the vehicle and started on our journey. We visited 7 of the 17 MDCs that he manages and I took the mock-up ColaLife Pods I made yesterday. Here they are in Coca-Cola crates. They fitted!
Here is the video. The first 1min 15secs is in Swahili as Benito explains the ColaLife idea to the people who work at the MDC. Then it breaks into English . . . . it’s very interesting what is said . . . .
Tomorrow I’m going to try and hook up with an NGO that operates locally that I think could help move this idea into a pilot phase: PSI Tanzania
What others are saying about ColaLife- ColaLife on Flickr
-
Auto-translation
