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ColaLife brokers partnership with global NGO for Tanzanian field work

4 August 2009 By 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 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

No more organisations needed?

18 February 2009 By Leave a Comment

It would be very attempting to set up ColaLife as an NGO but I strongly believe that the organisations needed to implement the ColaLife already exist and that we should focus on joining things up and facilitating relationships to make things happen. Now and again I receive a message that reassures me that this is correct and that this is the right approach. This arrived yesterday from Cami Allen who is the Program Manager at an organisation called ‘Vitamin Angels’. Check them out here. Cami has now joined the ColaLife Google Group.

It is a pleasure to find Colalife. In the past year we have approached Danone and Nestle regarding the potential for piggybacking vitamin A supplementation onto their existing distribution systems in markets with deep penetration down to the household level. Obviously these markets are more limited in global scope than is CocaCola.

Vitamin A may be an ideal “social product” to add to the pod. I am not sure to what extent you have been involved specifically in health care interventions in developing countries, so I will give a short overview of vitamin A if you will bear with me:

Vitamin A supplementation in over 60 priority countries is a key health intervention recommended by WHO/UNICEF. Vitamin A is known as the anti-infective vitamin, guarding against external infection. It is essential to the immune system, especially in children under five who are most susceptible to infectious diseases. Deficiency of vitamin A (VAD) is a major contributor to the mortality of children under five. Leading causes of death, including measles, malaria, acute respiratory infections, and diarrhea are reduced substantially by vitamin A supplementation alone.

% reduction of U5MR due to vitamin A supplementation:

  • Measles (50%)
  • Diarrhea (33%) an
  • Overall mortality (23%).

Operational research also shows evidence that vitamin A supplementation of neonates (in the first 2-3 days of life) can reduce mortality by a further 23-60%.

Vitamin A supplements are practical:

  • Need to be taken just once each six months. The body is able to store vitamin A in the liver, making it possible to get adequate vitamin A status with one high-dose capsule each 4-6 months.
  • No special storage or transport conditions (usually) required. Vitamin A very stable; relatively cool, dry environments are all that is needed
  • Some basic training is required to distribute, but no specialist medical personnel required.
  • Not controversial, and as a policy is already supported by virtually all national governments (as well as WHO and UNICEF).

In addition, it is considered to be one of the best investments possible from an cost-efficiency and efficacy standpoint:

http://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/Admin/Public/DWSDownload.aspx?File=%2fFiles%2fFiler%2fCC08%2fPresse++result%2fCopenhagen_Consensus_2008_Results_Press_Release.pdf

Vitamin A supplementation is also aligned with the Colalife goals to address MDGs 4 and 6 – and when given to deficient mothers, MDG 5 as well. It’s also aligned with Aims 1, 2, 4 and 5.

Anyway, we are pleased to have found your group and look forward to contributing to this discussion whenever possible. Down the road, if vitamin A supplements were to be selected as an appropriate “social product” for the Aidpods, we would be more than willing to supply this product for the trial and beyond. In addition, Vitamin Angels is deeply committed to exploring new distribution systems via public-private partnership, and there is some possibility that we may be able to commit other resources as well in order to make this happen.

If you’re interested in reviewing us further, our website is at www.vitaminangels.org. I have to warn you that the site is quite dated and not reflective of the strategic focus that we have adopted over the past 18 months. (A new site geared toward both our professional associations and cultivating our supporter base online will launch in May.)

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, Correspondence, NGOs, Partners Tagged With: , , ,

An amazing day in the life of ColaLife

12 December 2008 By Leave a Comment

Colalife at RRAC - clop

PART 1

I was roped into attending a workshop this afternoon representing Defra but what an amazing experience it was. It was entitled ‘Building resilient communities: from idea to sustainable action‘ and it was run by the Risk and Regulation Advisory Council. The subject was very familiar territory for me but the way it was done (by Innovationarts) was brilliant and there were some very influential people there (including Dame Julia Cleverdon). During the plenaries the discussion was captured by a cartoonist and as you can see above, ColaLife made it into the final plenary discussion.

I am always very careful not to mix ColaLife into my working day but it was dragged out of me! I was in a break-out group with a friend and ColaLife fan, Lola Barrett of Grenfell Housing Association. We were talking about the future and the role on technology and she said, “Go on Simon tell them. Tell them about ColaLife.” I refused but the protest was overwhelming(!) and it was a relevant example of the role of new technology. So I explained. Another member of our group then brought it into the plenary and it was captured by the cartoonist. And it got an applause!

PART 2

I spent Wednesday night writing up revised objectives for ColaLife based on the experience of the trip to Tanzania and I posted these to the ColaLife Google Group for comments. The modifications I suggested came mainly from one thing and that is that what is carried in the crates should be locally determined by health professionals. This means that we move away from ORS and educational materials on health and hygiene to ‘social products’ (a term used during the Tanzania meeting) of any sort. So we move towards the idea of a ‘colalife pod’ that can contain anything (within reason).

Anyway, this set ColaLife supporter Magedlena Serpa off on a mission as it made the proposition of interest to the organisation she works for. This resulted in an interrupted conference call to Washington on the 18:57 from Euston to Rugby! This was not entirely successful (the mobile signal was not good) but established contact with Peter Johnson of AED, a nonprofit organisation working globally to improve education, health, civil society and economic development – “the foundation of thriving societies”. AED have a turnover of more than $400 million and employ some 2,000 staff in more than 150 countries. Peter handles corporate relations for AED who have an existing relationship with Coca-Cola . . . are AED the multi-national NGO we are looking for? Well they may be. Watch this space.

All in all, a very exciting day! Have we reached a tipping point?

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

Mothers tell their story

13 September 2008 By Leave a Comment

I first found this video heavily embedded in the Save The Children’s Kroo Bay site. But it’s also on YouTube so I’m able to place it right here. This is the sort of despair this campaign is trying to stop.

More videos from Save the Children.

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

Answering some of the questions

19 August 2008 By Leave a Comment

Dehydrated Child

Various questions came out of the first get-together last week of the ColaLife Campaign. I thought it would be useful to try to expand on these and seek help/suggestions from readers of this blog, so here goes. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Coca Cola Campaign, Events, Facebook, LifeStraw, NGOs Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

One reason why WaterAid are reluctant to engage

9 July 2008 By 1 Comment

WaterAid graph

There has been a lot of activity going on behind the scenes recently in our efforts to get an international NGO to engage with the Coca-Cola Campaign. As I have indicated on the Facebook Group this is going to be a challenge.

The biggest leap forward came yesterday from an extremely helpful person in DfID who highlighted a WaterAid Report that was published on Monday (7/7/08) to coincide with the G8 Summit.

Above is a scan of page 6 of the report. As you can see, Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS) are the highest cost intervention when it comes to extending children’s lives BUT hygiene and sanitation promotion are at the top. We have always said, and I have said it in all of the interviews I have given, that education and awareness raising are just as important in this campaign as anything else. Now we have the data to show that.

LESSONS LEARNT: We need to be far more careful in our approach to NGOs. The two-sentence description of what we are doing is not enough. We need to spell out that we are not just about distributing ORS, we are about raising awareness of hygiene and sanitation issues as well. And ORS through Coca-Cola crates is potentailly a very effective way of doing this.

In my interview with Eddie Mair, I said (and I paraphrase) “It’s not as if people in the remote parts of Africa are crying out for rehydration salts. Many would not know what they are or how to use them. But ORS salts arriving in Coca-Cola crates would generate questions. ‘That’s not Coke? What is it?’”.

For this reason we have said that the ORS needs to be _inside_ the crates and they need to carry messages. They should be the UK equivalent of the plastic toy in the cereal packet. In addition, Coca-Cola agreeing to do this in a particular locality, may just be the stimulus that the local institutions need to form the foundation of a local campaign.

Right. WaterAid. Here I come again . . .

Filed Under: Background Data, Coca Cola Campaign, NGOs Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,